What Is Your Experience Navigating Active Directory?
Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) is a critical and complex system to manage. It serves as the figurative keys to the corporate kingdom, providing permissions and access to all IT assets across the enterprise, from devices to desktops to servers.
All users granted Domain Privileges—whether intentionally, accidentally, or through a breach—can cause serious problems for an IT organization that does not stay on top of the day-to-day management of the Directory and all its complexities.
Having the ability to crawl the Directory, identify problems, and correct them quickly by leveraging native Microsoft tools or third-party solutions is essential to maintaining a healthy working environment. Yet, functional gaps remain to be filled, and unforeseen risks need to be managed.
What’s at Risk?
Due to internal security and risk concerns, human error, and internal/external auditors of regulated firms, all IT organizations have strict policies and standards dictated by upper management. (Or they should.)
Although there are a variety of AD services supported by a logical directory structure consisting of objects, forests, trees, domains, and organizational units, inherent operational issues need to be regularly addressed or attested to by individuals with management or ownership privileges to ensure the AD environment is functioning properly.
Group Policy
Many inherent problems large organizations experience within AD are directly associated with Group Policy. Group Policy Object (GPO) management should be a major focus of any regulated organization looking to limit exposure and risk. This hierarchical structure within the directory allows administrators to implement specific configurations or changes for users and computers. To be effective, it should be uniform across the entire enterprise. Without uniformity and consistency, security and configuration settings—such as password expiration policies, audit configurations, and event logging—will be inconsistent. This inconsistency can cause conflicts, slow down user login experiences, and increase business continuity issues and potential breach risks.
Privileged Access
Problems associated with Active Directory can become systemic when they affect other critical areas, such as Privileged Access. Privileged Users can make changes to the system without authorization. A post-change audit log could potentially capture the occurrence, but then what? If Privileged Users are making unauthorized changes, PAM solutions are being bypassed! More importantly, stale accounts with privileged access create risk and technical debt. Unknown users can potentially make changes to the domain, including Group Policy Objects, which is an extremely risky practice.
Active Directory Nesting
Other areas within Active Directory that should be addressed to ensure efficiency include nested groups, circular nesting, broken inheritance, and serious violations involving domain administrators granting unauthorized access to colleagues in clear violation of corporate policy.
Resolving Operational Issues with SPHEREboard
SPHERE Technology Solutions is a niche software and services company that works with large, complex IT organizations to help them limit IT risk while addressing many of the security, governance, and compliance issues they face regularly. SPHERE’s proprietary technology solution, SPHEREboard, directly addresses areas of AD risk through GROUPcontrols, consolidating problematic AD groups and providing insight and an automated mechanism to certify and understand how even the simplest changes can impact critical systems.
- GPO Analysis: Identify all issues that need to be resolved to meet standards, identify security gaps, compliance violations, or other risks to the infrastructure.
- AD Permissions Analysis: Understand administrative access to gain visibility into who has the ability to change accounts and ensure remediation is managed and maintained.
- AD Delegate/Privileged Access Analysis & Clean-Up: Operational Unit delegates domain privileged access through group membership and Group Policy Object (GPO) management rights. Provides additional analysis of who has access to elevated roles to clean up and certify ownership.
- Owner Certification & Review: Conduct a detailed review to identify “probable” owners before any changes are implemented.
- Remediation: Use simple, flexible templates to allow for automated actions and the ability to trend future states and help drive priorities.
- Customization: Additional metrics and functionality can be added or developed upon request.
Take the complexity out of managing Active Directory groups with SPHERE.
