Identity foundations
Every serious breach ends up in your directory.
Active Directory decides who is allowed to be who inside your network, so attackers do not stop until they own it. Most environments we see were built quickly years ago by someone who has since left: flat structures, a dozen accounts with domain admin rights, group policies nobody dares change. We design the directory properly, migrate you onto it without weekend outages, connect it cleanly to Microsoft 365, and hand back a documented tiered model your own IT team can run.
- Zero-downtime
- Migration and domain upgrade approach
- Tier 0/1/2
- Privileged access model as standard
- Documented
- Handover your own IT team can operate
Sound familiar?
If two of these describe your week, this is the service that fixes it.
Too many people hold domain admin rights and nobody remembers why.
Ex-employee accounts are still enabled, and service accounts have passwords set years ago.
Group policy has grown by accretion — hundreds of settings, no owner, no documentation.
A single domain controller in one cupboard is the difference between working and not working.
What the service covers
How the work is actually done, day to day.
Design before deployment
Forest and domain layout, sites, an organisational unit structure that matches how you actually work, naming standards and a DNS plan. Written down first, so the build is boring and repeatable.
Build, migrate or rescue
Greenfield domains, workgroup-to-domain migrations, cross-forest consolidation after an acquisition, or repairing replication, FSMO roles and DNS on a domain that has been limping for years.
Privilege separated properly
A tiered admin model with dedicated admin accounts, protected groups, jump hosts and no daily-driver laptop ever holding domain rights — the single change that most reduces ransomware blast radius.
Group policy you can read
Baselines for workstations, servers and admins mapped to CIS benchmarks, with legacy policies retired rather than layered over, and every setting documented with the reason it exists.
Clean hybrid identity
Entra ID Connect, single sign-on, MFA and conditional access wired so cloud and on-premises agree on one identity — and so disabling a leaver removes access everywhere at once.
Resilience and monitoring
Redundant domain controllers, tested authoritative restore of the directory, and Kerberos, replication and privileged-group changes fed into monitoring so misuse is visible on day one.
What you receive
Documents you can hand to an auditor.
- As-is assessment with a ranked list of directory risks
- Low-level design document for forest, domains, sites and OU structure
- Built and tested environment with redundant domain controllers
- Tiered privileged access model and admin account inventory
- Group policy baseline set aligned to CIS benchmarks
- Hybrid identity configuration for Microsoft 365 with MFA and conditional access
- Backup and directory recovery runbook, proven by a live restore test
- Handover documentation and training for your IT team
Platforms we work with
Fluent in the tools, loyal to none of them.
If you already hold licences, we operate them — no resale margin, no forced migration. When a change genuinely closes a gap or saves money, you see both cost models side by side before anyone recommends anything.
Onboarding
How active directory deployment goes live.
- 01
A 45-minute conversation
What you run, what worries you, and what a bad week has already cost you. No slides and no product pitch — we are working out whether we can genuinely help.
- 02
Posture assessment
We examine the estate, compare it against a recognised framework and hand you a prioritised list of gaps. The report is yours to keep whether or not you buy anything.
- 03
Onboarding and a rehearsal
Log sources, agents, access and escalation contacts are agreed, then we run a live drill of a real incident before we call the service live. Untested escalation paths are decoration.
- 04
Steady-state operations
Monitoring, response and reporting run to a written SLA, with a quarterly review that changes the plan whenever your business changes.
Questions
What buyers ask about active directory deployment.
Pairs well with
All servicesSOC as a Service
A team of analysts watching your systems every hour of the day, deciding which alerts are real and acting on them.
02NOC as a Service
Continuous monitoring of networks, servers and applications so faults are caught and fixed before your users notice.
03Data Loss Prevention
Controls across laptops, email, network and cloud apps that spot sensitive data leaving and stop it in the moment.
Hand active directory deployment to people who do this daily.
Tell us how big the estate is and what deadline you are working to. Within three business days you will have a scope, a timeline and a flat monthly number — no discovery fee to get there.