In this lab, you will set up a basic Active Directory environment to gain practical experience with directory services. The steps will include installing Active Directory, creating two Organizational Units (OUs)—one for users and one for groups—and setting up both a user account and a group account. To demonstrate group membership management, you will then add the user to the group. This lab is designed to help you build foundational skills for managing users and resources in a Windows Server environment.

Maintaining security and managing user behavior in an enterprise environment is essential. Group Policy, a core feature of Microsoft Windows, allows administrators to enforce security and operational settings across the network. In this lab, you will implement group policies like strong password requirements, USB device restrictions, and automatic workstation locking to protect sensitive data.

In this lab, we will walk through the process of creating a Hyper-V virtual machine. The lab will guide you through selecting the VM's configuration, such as allocating memory, assigning virtual processors, and creating a virtual hard disk. We will then show how to choose the installation method, such as using an ISO image, to install the operating system.

Systems are at higher risk without a concerted, repeatable application security configuration process. In this lab, you will learn how to build a declarative AWAF policy and achieve OWASP Top Ten (2021) compliance with the BIG-IP OWASP Compliance Dashboard. A complete CI/CD pipeline is used to deploy our AWAF policy to the BIG-IP system using Application Services 3 Extension (AS3) and Ansible.