Autonomy gives independent control over resources. The Active Directory environment that is focused on autonomy will help administrators manage the resources independently, but there will be more privileged administrators who can manage the resources and privileges of other administrators.

There are two types of autonomy:

• Service autonomy: This will provide privileges to an individual or a group of administrators to control the service level of AD DS fully or partially. For example, it will allow administrators to add or remove domain controllers, modify Active Directory schema, and modify DNS without the forest owner.
• Data autonomy: This will provide privileges to an individual or a group of administrators to control data stored in Active Directory or domain-joined computers. This also allows you to perform any administrative task regarding data without approval from a higher, privileged account. This autonomy will not prevent forest service administrators from accessing the data.