Active Directory Integration Manual

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provisioning. This shortens the return on investment for adopting to a level where the hosting
providers purchases and installs the BackupAgent Server software.
2.1 Scalability
BackupAgent allows system administrators to automatically provision backup accounts using
their AD without involving any web shop or panel software. Best practice within hosting
providers is to control authentication for various applications using the AD. Web shops and
provisioning systems add or delete users in the AD. Subsystems authenticate and authorize
users in the AD to grant or deny access to an application. BackupAgent applies these best
practices.
2.2 Group memberships
BackupAgent Server authenticates users in the AD based on group memberships. A system
administrator can add predefined groups in the AD and add group membership to a user to
allow this user to backup data using an Online Backup Client. If a user accesses the
BackupAgent web servers for the first time, web server will detect this group membership and
will provision an account in the BA Database.
This approach will allow a hosting provider to integrate BackupAgent Server with an AD without
tedious and risky schema updates. Web shop software can provision users by assigning
applicable group memberships based backup plans.
To accomplish this, the AD groups work with predefined names. These names resemble a
complete backup plan for a specific user. The plan holds:
 A standard prefix ‘CloudBackup’
 The type of user
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: ‘Workstation’ or ‘Server’
 The maximum storage space in gigabytes or megabytes: ‘10GB’ or ‘5MB’
 The ID of the storage group
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on a NAS: ‘1003’
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A user can be Workstation user (allowing only data backup on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7
and Windows 8) or a Server user (allowing backup on all supported Windows operating systems
and backups of Exchange and SQL Server)