At its core, Active Directory domain services (AD DS) is a structured data store of objects in the domain controller. It is a directory service from Microsoft for identity management and access control in Windows domain networks. Active Directory can authenticate users, groups, services and computers to protected information. In addition to that, AD DS also helps to implement security policies and permissions. AD DS enforces them for all computers in your network.

The ongoing growth in the adoption of cloud services poses escalating opportunities and risks in equal measure. The increased capacity and scalability of cloud environment lends itself to an accelerated pace and higher volume of software and application development than ever before. This trend brings into play a huge increase in the number of software components and dependencies that developers use in their code bases.