'Read only' Admin privileges for Active Directory environment?

["Michael Gressick" <mgressick () gmail com>]

Hello,
Our InfoSec team has requested Domain Admin (or equivalent) privileges
on the corporate Active Directory to audit the environment's security.
The IT team in charge of this environment doesn't want to grant that
level of privilege.  InfoSec then requested a 'read-only' equivalent
to everything in the Active Directory.  The IT team hasn't been able
to provide this.  So my questions...

1) Is there an easy mechanism to grant a security group 'domain admin
read only'?  This would need to cover all aspects of the Active
Directory, including all services, servers, any type of access
Domain/Enterprise  Admins would have, just not change anything.
(Exchange, SQL, File servers, the works)  I was told a product named
Active Roles might solve this, but it seems quite expensive and way
beyond the scope of what we need.  Is there anything besides creating
a new group and manually applying permissions for this group
everywhere in the environment?

2)  How does your company (assuming you have a seperate security team)
provide access to the InfoSec team to audit/secure AD? Do you give
full admin rights, or what have you guys come up with?

Thanks
Mike

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