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IT security analysts and IT administrators very often have a need to determine the complete expanded membership of nested Active Directory security groups. Determining the complete membership of nested security group memberships is essential for determining who all is provisioned access via membership in the group, on all IT assets which use this security group to control access.
Nested security groups are security groups that are members of other security groups. For instance, in the illustration below, Group 1 is a member of Group 2 which is further a member of Groups 3 and 4, and so on and so forth. It is not unusual for security groups to be nested in other security groups.
Manual determination of Active Directory nested group memberships can be complicated because security groups could be easily nested to 4 or 5 levels, and some nested security groups could be members of each other thus creating loops which can be problematic when using scripts.
In addition, the expansion of certain well-known groups such as Domain Users can create additional work as these group memberships may have to be dynamically calculated. Finally, because nested group members could belong to multiple domains, IT administrators may need to query each of these domains to arrive at the final fully expanded group membership of a nested group.
There is an Active Directory Reporting Tool, called Gold Finger, from Paramount Defenses that can be used to instantly generate 100% accurate nested group membership reports in Active Directory.
Gold Finger is endorsed by Microsoft and it completely automates the generation of accurate Active Directory Nested Group Memberships and lets you instantly and accurately determine and print complete expanded nested group memberships of any nested security group in Active Directory.
It automatically takes care of all underlying technical details such as circular nesting, conflict avoidance, etc to instantly deliver complete and accurate expanded nested group membership list.
Gold Finger also provides the ability to filter the completed expanded nested group membership by security principal. You can filter results such that it displays only all user-account members, or all computer-account members, or all security-group members, or display all its members.
How to Instantly Determine Nested Group Memberships in Active Directory – A Demo
The following is a demo of the Microsoft-endorsed Gold Finger reporting solution for Active Directory, which can be used to instantly obtain, export, report and document the complete expanded nested group membership of any Active Directory group –
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