In the modern workforce, we can work from home – or from any location that has internet access – more easily than ever. We often interact and comment on social media as individuals as part of our professional lives. Where we log in from, how we access resources and the devices we use are interchangeable and blur the line between these two formerly distinct parts of life.

As an individual, it’s professionally liberating but for IT managers and CISOs, this extended environment includes far too many access points that bad actors can use to get to the precious corporate resources. This situation mandates a comprehensive change in our approach security. The balance that IT managers and CISOs work to achieve is to give their users safe access without heavy-handed security measures impeding productivity. They must consider many factors and weigh options as to how they can safely support the business in reaching its objectives. The aim is to secure the enterprise without users noticing. In a word, to make security frictionless to the user.

Active Directory is everywhere and Azure Active Directory (AAD), its cloud-based cousin, is quickly gaining ground. Currently, nearly ninety percent of organizations worldwide are using Active Directory (AD) for on-premises resources (aka on-prem). That represents 500 million organizations and somewhere around 10 billion daily authentications. In fact, in the world of identity and access management (IAM), AD has become unavoidable and absolutely necessary for on-prem user authentication and authorization. You have to go through AD. It’s just how it’s done. Now, mix in the cloud – and Azure AD– and your management complexity just skyrocketed – and you could be in for a world of pain, if your on-prem or cloud identity environments are not managed and synched properly.

One of the fastest growing segments of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) market is the cloud segment. Increasingly, companies are choosing to move at least part of their security infrastructure to cloud-based solutions. Even if you still run critical IAM service on-prem, there’s a great chance you manage and integrate with cloud applications.

Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) administration and management includes 12 major tasks. These tasks cover a wide breadth of business needs and are not all performed solely by AD DS administrators. In fact, administrators can and should delegate several tasks to other members of their technical community, technicians, help desk personnel, even users such as team managers and administrative assistants. While delegation is a way to reduce the amount of work administrators have to do when managing AD DS infrastructures, it really only addresses one or two of the 12 tasks, for example, user and group administration as well as end point device administration. The other ten tasks can be staggering in nature — security, networked service administration, OU-Specific Management, Group Policy Object management and many more — and because of this can take up inordinate amounts of time. You can rely on Microsoft’s built-in tools to reduce some of this workload, but are the native tools enough? Perhaps it’s time to reduce AD DS administration overhead by automating most tasks and tightening internal security. Address this by first, determining what the twelve essential labors of Active Directory are and then, see how you can reduce AD DS workloads through the implementation of proper management and administration tools.

How many of us, in our quest to be secure, feel like Emmet in 2014’s The Lego Movie? We see these incredible identity governance and administration (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) projects that our ‘master builder’ peers seem to be succeeding with and we feel entirely inadequate. They execute powerful programs that appear to deliver full, enterprise-wide identity administration and associated governance. They seem to achieve privileged access management with full coverage and rich functionality. And, they claim to succeed in a world that is entirely unrelated to the real world we live in.

The challenges with managing accounts in Active Directory (AD) and Azure AD are many and varied. With the frantic pace of today’s business world, organizations struggle to keep up with requests to create, change and remove access to their on-premises AD. This scenario becomes even more complicated when you mix in a hybrid AD environment.

AD security is crucial to controlling risk and ensuring compliance Active Directory (AD) is the foundation of identity and access management (IAM) at most organizations and, as such, is probably the most crucial technology on the network. More and more systems and applications depend on AD and Azure Active Directory (AAD) for authentication, policy, entitlements, and configuration management. If AD is insecure, everything is insecure.

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is one of the most important areas of risk management and security in any organization. Changing business practices, agile software development and digital transformation has meant that PAM solutions need an enhanced set of features to reduce the risk of privileged accounts being hijacked in this more challenging operating environment.

One of the most important aspects of an identity and access management (IAM) program is the securing, management and governance of the accounts belonging to superusers — privileged accounts. Like the accounts used by regular users, these superuser accounts require access management – ensuring that admins have the access they need to do their job — and governance – ensuring that there is oversight and control over that access, often for the purpose of compliance. Unfortunately, privileged accounts have some unique idiosyncrasies that make both access management and governance difficult or impossible with traditional PAM methods. To learn how to deal with those unique characteristics and manage your privileged accounts successfully, assume that the ideal PAM program addresses the broadest range of privileged accounts and elevated-access users. That’s where the problems start for most organizations.

Before there were privileged access management (PAM) solutions, it seemed that everyone was given access to privileged accounts with little regard for who had access, when they had access and what they did with that access. As security breaches started to rise and compliance regulations were written, it was obvious that manual processes and home-grown approaches to privileged access management solutions weren’t enough. Why make the investment to next-gen PAM? After we briefly cover the history of first-gen and next-gen PAM solutions, we will give you five reasons to consider purchasing next-gen PAM solutions. At minimum, we think you’ll be intrigued and, at best, convinced you need to procure next-gen for your organization.

Privileged accounts are a necessity in any enterprise IT environment, since they enable administrators to manage the environment. But as news reports constantly remind us, granting privileged access increases the risk of a security breach, no matter what industry your organization represents. However, your organization does not have to become the next statistic. By taking the five concrete steps outlined in this paper, you can help protect your organization from the risks inherent in privileged accounts.

So where does the power lie in your enterprise? Who has admin access to which resources? And how much are you relying on faith in your current security approach to ensure that the wrong person doesn’t find a weakness and exploit it?