Active Directory Migration

What is AD Migration?

Active Directory Migrations involves the movement of users, workstations, policies, organization unit, certificates and other services to a new domain or combining two Domain to one. AD authenticates and authorizes users, endpoints and services of the entire IT systems.AD Migration is Required when organizations like to upgrade their infrastructure or planning for mergers or acquisitions or divestitures. AD Migration is a complex process and requires well planning and Testing.

Active Directory in Nutshell

What is Active Directory?

Active Directory (AD) is a Directory service to manage permissions and control access to network resources.

Active Directory services

The main service in AD is Domain Services, it also includes Lightweight Directory Services, LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), ADFS single sign-on, Certificate Services, Federation Service and RMS (Rights Management Services).

Active Directory Domain Services uses a tiered layout structure consisting of domains, trees and forests to coordinate networked elements. Exchange Server, File server and SharePoint Server, rely on AD DS to provide resource access. The server that hosts AD DS is the Domain Controller.

Lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) is a protocol store data in the LDAP directory and authenticate users to access the directory.

An Active Directory Domain is a collection of objects like user, group, policy, devices, workstation, printers etc, within a Microsoft Active Directory network.

Tree is a collection of domains. We can join the Domains in a tree by trust relationships. Forest is a collection of one or more domain trees.

Other directory services on the market that provide similar functionality to windows Microsoft Active Directory include Red Hat Directory Server, Apache Directory and OpenLDAP.

Active Directory Migration Tools:

There are several tools available for Active Directory migration from Microsoft and third-party vendors. Here are some commonly used AD migration tools. The choice of AD migration tool depends on the specific needs of the organization and the AD Objects involved in the migration. The key features need to look in to the Tools Capabilities are Pre-Migration Assessment, cross-forest domain Migration, Profile migration, and migrating Microsoft products like Exchange, SharePoint, Teams etc.

- - - Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT)
    - Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM)
    - Quest Migration Manager for Active Directory
    - Binary Tree Active Directory Pro.
    - Dell Migration Manager for Active Directory
    - AD Migration Manager
    - Secure Copy
    - CopyRight2
    - NetIQ Domain Migration Administrator
    - Binary Tree Migratwe

AD Migration from one Domain to another

We can easily move users, groups and OU AD Objects from one Domain to another using AD Management Tools like Active Directory Pro which is a GUI based Tool kit ,using this we can exports AD objects to an csv file and import back to the Target Domain.

AD Migration :On-Premise Active Directory to Azure Cloud

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management service. Azure AD is the backbone of Office 365 and other Azure products. Azure AD uses a REST API and uses its own built-in web-based authentication protocols. Whereas Windows Active Directory uses Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, Kerberos and NTLM authentication protocols which are used in on-premises domain joined environments to allow Single Sign On (SSO) .so there are limitations in Authentication & Device management functionality for full cloud approach.

On- Premise Active Directory can be synced with Azure Active Directory using Azure AD synchronization Tool. All objects and credentials from on-premises can be synchronized to Azure AD using Azure AD Connect. Post AD Connect Synchronization we need to Enable single-sign-on & password thru Authentication for the users to access all needed applications with a single login using the same password in both on-premise and AD application using the same password.

AD Migration :On-Premise AD with AWS

AWS Managed Microsoft AD enables us to use managed Microsoft Active Directory on the AWS Cloud. Using AWS Managed Microsoft AD and AD Connector build trust between an AWS hosted directory services and on-premises directories.

We can also migrate on-premises Active Directory (AD) domain to AWS using Active Directory Migration Toolkit (ADMT) and Password Export Service (PES).