What is delegation of administration?

Delegation of administration is the act of distributing and delegating administrative responsibilities for various aspects of IT management amongst an adequate number of administrators.

An IT infrastructure of a typical medium and large organization is comprised of thousands of IT assets such as user accounts, computers, files and databases, applications and vital services (name resolution, service location, email and instant messaging, remote access, etc.), each of which needs to be adequately administered. In such IT infrastructures, it is not possible for a handful of administrators to adequately administer all aspects of the IT infrastructure.

Thus, in most IT infrastructures, administrative responsibilities for managing the various IT assets that together comprise the IT infrastructure are distributed (or delegated) amongst an adequate (and typically larger) number of (usually less-privileged) administrators, who are then individually or collectively responsible for managing smaller specific portions of the IT infrastructure.

The act of provisioning sufficient access so as to grant a delegated administrator the ability to carry out designated responsibilities is commonly referred to as administrative delegation.

What is Active Directory?

Active Directory is Microsoft's implementation of an enterprise-grade, standards-compliant directory service that facilitates the location of network resources in an IT environment.

Clients can use the Active Directory to locate IT resources such as computers, network shares, and services. Active Directory provides access to its clients by virtue of the industry standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) protocol.

It is also used to store and protect domain user accounts, security groups, computer accounts, service connection points, group policies and Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and distribution groups. It thus plays a central role in IT management, delegation of administrative responsibilities and the specification and deployment of host security and management policies.

Active Directory can be used to fulfill numerous IT requirements, ranging from the deployment of a NOS directory-service to the deployment of light-weight directory enabled applications.