Secure that Active Directory Migration

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our session around securing your Active Directory migration. I'll go ahead and start with a quick introduction of myself. I am Bryan Patton. I've been at Quest a little bit over 20 years. And my first migration was literally in the year 2000. You can see my picture, I've changed just a little bit with my feature set over the last 20 plus years. That picture was actually taken January 2002 when I first started at Quest Software. My first migration was shortly after getting out of the Marine Corps. I was an emotional wreck in the fact that it's my first job out of the Marine Corps. I was doing consulting. I had some experience with Banyan VINES during my time in the military, but I was tasked with helping a customer move from Banyan VINES. They had had an acquisition of another company that had Novell So we had to get from Novell to this new system of Active Directory and Exchange 2000. So I've learned a lot. I had a bit of imposter syndrome at that time where I felt way over my head in that I was scared I was going be losing my job. So that's a little bit about me. And Joe, can you tell me a little about your first migration? Sure. So my first migration was in 1999. I had been a messaging and collaborative computing administrator before that and got a job working for a really large Silicon Valley company. And they had everything, everything that you could imagine, from operating systems to messaging systems. And one of my jobs was to help them consolidate all of those systems together. And boy, that was a fun time. It was really interesting time in Silicon Valley and being able to do those migrations, try to consolidate all those things has really of started my career in focusing on migrations and the migration space. So leading to this, there's a lot of different changes you'd probably do differently now that you're old and you have a little more wisdom, right? Right. So things have definitely changed a little bit. Yes. I'm thinking back to the year 2000. AD was built to interoperate with absolutely everything. Microsoft wanted everybody to be able to use this different system. Can you tell me a little about how-- I mean, you're focusing only on migrations. I focus on a lot of the different security stuff. How have things really changed in the last 20 plus years of you doing migrations? Right. So migrations have changed. The biggest thing that we face today is simply the technology's changed. Technology's changed significantly over the last 20 years. The biggest thing to understand is that 20 years ago, the tools that were available to do migrations were very limited. There was only really one, it was ADMT. ADMT version 2.0 came out in 2003. I remember that. Yeah. And so understand, though, that the environments that we're working in are different today. The security, the requirements around doing AD migrations in 2003 were very different. We have situations in 2003 where we were worried about high school kids with their USRobotics dial up modems trying to break into companies to steal games. We saw the Anti-Root Force being recommended for most organizations. Right. Right. Exactly. And so the thing with it is that that's not how security and corporations are designed today. Security is much more prevalent. There are ransomware attacks every single day. Every single day there are ransomware attacks. You have a lot of ransomware 20 years ago? None. There wasn't. There was no ransomware 20 years ago. And it's really important to understand that using methods to do Active Directory migrations that were designed 20 years ago do not fit in today's world in today's corporate environments. And it's understanding that the technology that you're using, the architecture, the methodologies that you're using to do AD migrations today cannot be the same methodologies that you use 20 years ago. Yeah, 20 plus years ago you're still burning CDs to-- Yeah, right? Yeah. Right, exactly. I haven't seen a CD in a while. It's crazy. The other thing to keep in mind, and this is really important, is that Active Directory migrations in the past were simply that, just Active Directory migrations. There wasn't cloud technologies 20 years ago. But today it's prevalent. In almost every single environment that we work in, cloud technologies have some part and some component of most corporate infrastructures today. So when we talk about doing Active Directory migrations, we're talking about not just AD. We're talking about all of the other systems that come into play when we start talking about these migrations. So everything is connected. What you used to know about Active Directory migrations where you take a server from here, a workstation, and you move it over there. You didn't have to worry about all the other ancillary things that were coming into connection-- connecting into that AD environment, but today you don't have a choice. Everything is going to impact everything else and it's really important to understand all of those connections. Because if you miss those during your Active Directory migrations, your migration's going to fail. Well, I'm even thinking the reason why people are doing migrations a little bit differently as well. At that time, people were getting off of Novell, off of NT, antiquated technologies. So the thought process when you're doing a migration early 2000s was I want to get there as quickly as possible so I can move all of my life. I think things have shifted just a little bit recently as well. Absolutely. And understand that what it means for your project, your migration project, is that with these additional complexities, your project is going to take longer. You're going to need to spend more time planning. You're going to need to take