Scenario

A medium-sized company, with more than 8,000 employees across various departments is in a phase of rapid development and are opening multiple locations. The company purchased a few Webex services such as Messaging, Meetings, and Hybrid Services. The customer IT administrator needs to provision the users to the Webex cloud, after which the users can use assigned Webex services.

With the rapid development of the company, there are employees joining and leaving. The IT team want to manage these changes, so they need to add new users into their enterprise directory and also delete the user accounts for people who left.

Problem

The IT team produced a report that shows that former employees and contractors can still access services. The IT team didn’t immediately remove the user from the cloud after they finished the update in the HR service system. IT teams generally don’t have sufficient availability to support frequent changes. As a result, there is a discrepancy in the financial report and the service usage summary report. This poses a risk of leaked confidential information because users who already left the company can still access services.

The issues in this scenario require an automated solution.

Organizational Goals

The organization expects a low maintenance effort to:

• Automatically provision new users to the cloud and automatically remove the deleted users from cloud. The new users are automatically assigned services and the former employees are denied to access to the services.

• Synchronize the user changes from on-premises to the cloud.

• Strictly make the cloud user account information consistent with on-premises directory.

Solution

Directory Connector solves this problem and facilitate the customers to provision users to the identity service in the Webex cloud.

Directory Connector is an on-premises application that you can set up on the AD DS devices. Then, the Directory Connector can talk with the on-Premises Active Directory and monitor the changes to sync the changes to the cloud.

The Directory Connector is easy to set up and maintain. After you set up Directory Connector, you never have to worry about the security and consistency between the cloud and on-premises Active Directory. Here are examples of benefits that the software provides:

• The user is completely deleted from the cloud once the user is removed from on-premises Active Directory. This ensures that the departed user is denied permission to access services.

• The software can be a distributed deployment for High Availability. The other Connector can be automatically activated when the previous active one is disconnected. So, High Availability can serve your business without you worrying about missing changes in the on-premises AD.

• The software prevents accidental changes to user data. Directory Connector maintains the integrity of the user data. Once the Directory Connector is enabled, the only data source is the on-premises Active Directory.

• The software can synchronize data to the cloud at a frequency of your choosing. You can choose either a full or incremental synchronization of the changes.

Conclusion

Directory Connector simplifies provisioning users to Webex for big enterprise customers with hundreds of users. With this tool, you can keep your user data in sync and prevent the issues that are covered in the scenario.