DriveHQ Natively Supports Active Directory Integration and Single Sign-on (SSO)

About Active Directory

If you have worked for a large organization, most likely you have heard of Active Directory. In fact, over 90% of corporate users use it every day!


Active Directory (AD) is a distributed LDAP-compliant directory service included with Microsoft Windows Server Operating Systems. The primary function of AD is to provide authentication and authorization services for hardware and software resources on the network like computers, user accounts, printers, groups, etc. It enables centralized, secure management of an entire enterprise network, which might span a building, a city, or multiple locations throughout the world.

For large organizations, AD makes system administration a lot more efficient. Imagine a large organization with 100 locations, 10,000 employees and 2,000 shared folders, the IT department can fully control all computers, users, groups from the central AD server. The access rights can be applied based on groups and individual objects.

DriveHQ Active Directory Integration and SSO

DriveHQ's cloud IT system already includes a lot of components similar to Active Directory, e.g. it supports different user roles, sub-groups, contact groups, files and folders. You can share different folders to different users / sub-groups / contact groups with different permissions. Small organizations can directly use DriveHQ's enterprise service or group account service without Active Directory Integration.

For a large organization that needs to move parts of their IT system to the cloud, DriveHQ Active Directory Agent Service can make the process extremely easy and painless. Just install the AD Agent Service on the domain server (or any other server that joined the domain) and logon as a domain administrator, the agent service will integrate the logon process. Users can easily logon DriveHQ cloud IT service using their email address and the password that they use to logon their Windows PC. They don't need to create a new password on DriveHQ.

System administrators can easily batch import users from the Active Directory database into DriveHQ Cloud IT system. They can also configure whether a user account should support SSO.

The SSO feature can be further customized to support other form of authentication

Compare with Other Services

Compared with other services such as Dropbox, Box and Egnyte, DriveHQ supports Active Directory integration and Single Sign-on natively without relying on a 3rd party service provider; Dropbox, Box and Egnyte don't have their own solution and rely on 3rd party services for AD integration and SSO. Involving a 3rd party not only makes the service more complicated, but also it makes the system less secure, not to mention that it significantly increases the cost per user.