Transitioning to a Modern AD

It is certainly a very rare occurrence these days that an Active Directory organization of significant size and complexity is being built in a vacuum, without years’ worth of infrastructure, data, and processes to take into account. While new companies, non-profits, and public institutions are created every day, they often start off as “cloud first,” or are embedded in an existing framework of systems, processes, and policies, or – especially in research and education – are basing their new infrastructure on Unix or Linux and make use of authentication and configuration providers available in that ecosystem. The only cases an AD is built without a pre-existing AD are