Tools: Active Directory Automation and Rules Enforcement

Many Active Directory administrators are often faced with daunting tasks on a daily basis, like generating reports, importing and exporting users from one platform to another, enforcing security standards, etc. With the adoption of cloud computing, Identity and access management tasks extend beyond Active Directory to a myriad of other platforms, such as Office 365, Microsoft Exchange, and more. Provisioning and managing user accounts across many platforms, using the native tools of each platform, quickly becomes an enormous task if you've got more than a handful of users.

Most administrators are forced to plod along, performing manual tasks using the native tools, using their mouse to navigate through screens in the Active Directory management tools, or web-based consoles offered by the cloud-based platforms. Some platforms offer command-line tools, scripting toolkits, or published web service API's, and some advanced administrators have tackled the steep learning curve to incorporate these into their processes.

As more and more services are migrated to the cloud, more user accounts, more web consoles, more API's, and more manual processes will only make administrator productivity get worse and worse. What we need is a way to abstract the management of each platform into a framework that provides a standardized administration process across these platforms.

Cayo Admin Assistant^TM provides a graphical interface to build and schedule automated processes across multiple platforms. Common tasks are created by grouping together building blocks that Cayo calls "commands". For example, there's a command for querying Active Directory for user accounts. Combine that with commands for filtering, sorting and exporting the results, and you've got your reports. Another powerful example is to query Active Directory for new users, sort and filter the results, and provision those new users in Office 365 or any other platform for which you have the extension installed. Admin Assistant enables automation and scheduling of repetitive tasks, business rules enforcement, bulk administration and reporting across multiple platforms using a single interface.

Cayo Admin Assistant

Admin Assistant is extensible. Extensions provide the needed commands for a given platform. Out of the box, the Active Directory extension is available, as well as a Utility extension which provides common filtering, sorting, import/export and other miscellaneous commands. Also available are extensions for Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange (this extension is currently in Beta as of this writing), with more on the way. These extensions enable Admin Assistant to provide a single interface through which common administrative tasks can be performed across your multi-platform hybrid cloud environment.

If Admin Assistant doesn't provide the command, let Cayo know! They're constantly working on new commands that will be released as product updates, as well as new extensions, such as the Microsoft Azure extension. As your company deploys services onto new platforms, and as Cayo delivers the extensions for that platform, your administrators will be able to hit the ground running, performing administrative tasks on the new platform using one common interface, without reinventing the wheel each time.

Admin Assistant can be purchased as part of the Cayo Administrator^TM Suite, or purchased separately. Download your free trial at www.cayosoft.com.