One of the benefits of moving an organization to an Active Directory environment is the use of trees and forests. Trees are groups of one or more domains who share resources. Each domain within the tree trusts the other domains in areas of security. A domain added to a tree becomes a child of that tree root domain. These trees can then become a part of a forest. A forest is a collection of numerous trees who share a common large-scale catalog, directory outline, logical structure, and directory arrangement. Forests permit organizations to group their divisions that may need to operate self-sufficiently and use different naming patterns, but still need to communicate with the entire organization through trustworthy sites and share some of the same resources. This allows the organization to reduce costs without added complication and have greater security. (1)
Another benefit would be user management. Due to active directory’s forest design, users in one domain are known to the forest domain director. This provides for more flexibility and ease of access for users who must travel from one site to another. A user can travel from site 1 to site 2 and still be able to log in with their usual username and password and have access to all resources throughout the domain. (2)
Another useful tool within active directory is group policy. Say you have an employee or group of employees who don’t necessarily follow your rules for computer use. They change their CPU’s desktop environment, including screen savers and wallpaper (sometimes downloading these from potentially dangerous websites). They are constantly downloading music from less than secure websites and visiting websites like YouTube and Facebook, instead of doing their work. These actions, in and of themselves, can be a potential security risk. This organization can utilize the group policy editor to set