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Home / LEARN / What is Active Directory Management (AD Mgmt)?

What is Active Directory Management (AD Mgmt)?

Active Directory management (AD Mgmt) is how savvy organizations automate identity workflows, secure user access, and bring efficiency and governance to the management of identities and accounts across vast enterprises. Due to the broad use of Active Directory (AD) and Azure AD, it is a primary and easy target of threat actors. Therefore, optimally deploying and managing AD is critical to reduce risk within organizations.

Benefits of AD Management

Unify identities across hybrid environment

Consolidate identity and permissions management of your Active Directory and Azure Active Directory environments. Active Directory management and security (AD Mgmt) enables you to centralize control of user access to your applications, databases, SaaS resources and anything else that is AD-connected.

Extends identity management and AD governance far beyond Windows

Expand user-provisioning capabilities across your hybrid and heterogeneous environment to manage access not only to your Windows-based resources but also to UNIX/Linux and Mac OS X environments and cloud-based resources.

Helps to ensure compliance

With locked-down and automated access-approval processes and reporting capabilities, Active Directory management and security can help to ensure compliance and reduce audit-related stress.

Automate AD/AAD administration

You can enhance the efficiency of your organization Active Directory management with consistent and streamlined operations through automated account lifecycle management.
Why is Active Directory management important?

Why is Active Directory management important?

Active Directory management (AD Mgmt) is important because over 95 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies use Active Directory to manage identities and access. Its widespread use makes it a primary target of threat actors. As a result, ADMS is critical to ensure efficient management of user-provisioning tasks and to protect your organization against data breaches and ransomware attacks. Plus, you can automate and accelerate user-provisioning tasks to save precious IT time; and you can extend permissions control via AD by integrating non-Windows resources into your AD infrastructure.
How does Active Directory management contribute to implementing a Zero Trust model?

How does Active Directory management contribute to implementing a Zero Trust model?

With AD Mgmt, you know that each AD admin and every user in your hybrid AD environment has only the permissions necessary to do their job – nothing more, nothing less. This least-privilege strategy combined with Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning are the core of the Zero Trust model. ‘Never trust, always verify’ is the Zero Trust slogan. That philosophy ensures maximum protection and can stop and/or limit damage by an internal or externalthreat actor if a credential is compromised. Strictly speaking, users have no permissions until they need to access a specific resource, then temporarily and unique authentication is used. The resource is available for a specified period of time (session management), which once expired, that user again has no access. This protects the user credentials from being used by a threat actor, and protects resources from being misused during a breach, as well as prevents data from being exfiltrated or altered.
How does Active Directory Management drive efficiency?

How does AD management drive efficiency?

Active Directory management defines administrative policies and associated permissions to enforce administrator access rules and eliminate errors and inconsistencies common with manual processes and native management tools. With templated and customizable workflows, you can ensure policies are followed and accelerate provisioning/de-provisioning tasks. Plus, by automating mundane tasks, you can eliminate errors that often occur during manual processes. Furthermore, when you integrate your AD infrastructure with other operational systems, such as HR and ITSM systems, you can sync user data across multiple platforms.
How does AD Management contribute to identity governance?

How does AD Management contribute to identity governance?

Active Directory management provides identity governance and administration capabilities to your entire enterprise, regardless if the resources are on-premises applications, Azure-based apps (including Office 365 and SaaS apps), or cloud/SaaS and resources. Plus, with aforementioned templated workflows – as well as the ability to create customized ones – you can implement policies to achieve governance and automate processes to ensure you stay compliant. Combined with reporting capabilities of One Identity solutions, you can reduce stress levels often associated with upcoming audits.

 

What are Active Directory vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them?

Since organization’s rely on AD and Azure AD for authentication and single sign-on support for their users, hackers are constantly looking for vulnerabilities in your AD. Here are some common AD vulnerabilities hackers try to exploit:

  • Compromised Usernames and Passwords: Hackers can get lists of previously compromised usernames and passwords and plug them into your login page until they find a fit
  • Default Credentials: Every single device connected to your network comes with default credentials that hackers can easily guess
  • Hardcoded Credentials: Hackers can review scripts and scheduled tasks to discover usernames and passwords in the script
  • Email Phishing, Vishing, Whaling Exploits, etc.: Hackers love to send emails to your users that seem like they’re coming from within the company to get them to click on links and enter their login information
  • Local Loop Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR): Hackers leverage Windows systems with certain browser settings to set up their own web servers that can ask for user credentials from your user system
  • Kerberoasting: Kerberoasting is an attack against AD that uses the SPN attribute on a user object
  • Elevated Privileges: Hackers often infiltrate a standard account with weak cybersecurity practices and elevate the account’s credentials to get access to more of your organization’s data

Granting privileged access only when needed and then removing those rights and changing the account’s password immediately after the session is concluded, as well as having full visibility across all access rights (who is accessing what and when) can help your organization avoid all the challenges above. One Identity Just-in-Time Privilege and Active Roles offer all of those solutions.

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