It’s old, bloated and complicated, but it’s not going away anytime soon. Get the “Active” back in Active Directory with OneLogin’s AD Integration.

Ninety-five percent of Fortune 500 companies use Active Directory (AD) to help manage their network architecture of on-premise PCs, applications, servers, and tools. Created in the 90’s, AD is an intricate technology to use and maintain, and is firmly entrenched into the enterprise IT infrastructure. AD’s importance is undisputed, but it is also crimping enterprise business ability to move at light speed. Here are 3 sad reasons why - all of which can be solved with OneLogin:

Fact #1
Active Directory’s complexity slows IT’s ability to respond to business needs.

Originally architected when IT owned and dictated everything, including the look, feel and operation of user applications, Active Directory has failed to keep up. Have you tried to implement Single-Sign-On for your legacy, cloud and mobiles apps with Active Directory? If so, your custom integration likely took you months to complete, and probably lacked advanced functionality like multi-factor authentication, and rapid off-boarding - a must-have when employees or contractors leave an organization.

Fact #2
Active Directory increases the daily IT workload.

IT managers say they spend too much time integrating new apps into their Active Directory infrastructure. This is especially true as most new apps come from the cloud. In addition, different user communities require different security policies, and creating a new Active Directory group for every use case is time consuming. Active Directory’s provisioning complexity coupled with different authentication procedures and decentralized administration leads to higher identity management costs, and frustrated, overworked IT teams. Getting a short-term contractor access the right apps with the right entitlements should take minutes, not hours or days. Business is constantly being asked to do ‘more with less’, but with Active Directory we tend get ‘less with more’.

Fact #3
Active Directory encourages the wrong kind of behavior and increases security risks.

Users have figured out they can easily bypass traditional IT to get the services and capabilities they need. This so-called “Shadow IT” has resulted in raising security risk-levels inside the enterprise. For example, poor password hygiene runs hand-in-hand with Shadow IT. A recent survey revealed that 71 percent admit to using unsanctioned app like Dropbox and Google Apps to get work done, and 44 percent said employees manage passwords on sticky notes and spreadsheets. It’s an IT security nightmare.

While Active Directory may not be going away anytime soon, when combined with OneLogin, deployments can be greatly simplified, and enterprises can enjoy enhanced security, resource and user management. OneLogin can integrate legacy, in-house and cloudbase apps securely, easily and seamlessly. And it yields some terrific additional benefits not available in an Active Directory-only infrastructure:

• A one password world. The combination of SAML-based (Security Assertion Markup Language) single sign-on and cloud-based integration eliminates passwords for all the applications that support SAML.
• Unified directories – For organizations with a user base spread over multiple directories, cloud-based directory integration can combine and present them as one, unified directory to other applications for federation via SAML.
• Centralized access control – Instead of signing into applications directly, users must authenticate via the identity provider, subject to multiple authentication factors.
• Centralized audit trails – All sign-in activity is recorded in a centralized audit trail, which simplifies compliance and enables cross-application analysis.