AD Group Policy

AD Group Policies are critical pieces of instructions in an AD environment that an IT administrator can configure.
AD Group policies will determine the behaviour and privileges for users and computers.
Group policies are primarily a security solution for the AD network.
Administrators can configure these settings and then implement sets of these settings on sites, domains, or OUs containing users and computers.

Example

Suppose there are two Organizational Units in the Active Directory, "Sales" and "IT".
Now, we want that the "sales" OU should not access a particular resource in the AD but the "IT" OU should access it.
This is how we implement Group Policy.

Group Policy Management Console (GPMC)

It is a console which helps us in creating different types of settings (policies/configurations).

This is a collection of settings that are created by GPMC
Example : Security configurations, password policies, Network deployment, desktop configuration etc.

There are 2 types of group policy:

Local Group Policy :
- Affects only work station it is on.
- Each computer running the windows line of the operating system has exactly one local group policy.
- It is available only to the particular computer in which it resides and the users who log on to that computer.
- The local group policy objects reside in the %systemroot%\System32\Group Policy folder.
Centralized Group Policy :
- Each domain controller has one or more centralized group policies.
- They are available to all the machines and user in the AD environment.
- A centralized Group Policy can be applied to all users and computers in a domain, or to a particular OU depending on where the Group Policy is linked.

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