Top 5 Reasons for Third Party Active Directory Tools
1. Security
Many threats to IT environments are being created each day by those with malicious intent. While many threats are external, the most insidious threat may come from the internal user that has unchecked IT privileges and access to essential data. The Verizon 2010 Data Breach Investigations Report stated that 48% of data breaches are done by insiders. The actions by 90% of those insiders are done on purpose with malicious intent in mind.
The security requirements that IT departments face are coupled with declining budgets and users with access to more data than they need to perform their job. This unnecessary access is a key reason for the increased security risk.
Active Directory provides the solutions and processes that can assist with the management of user identities, maintaining necessary services, reducing organizational risk, and performing all of these tasks within budget constraints.
2. Apply and enforce controls
Solutions are necessary to provide administrative controls that Active Directory lacks. Granular separation of administrative duties is a solution that is needed to easily provide only the access that is necessary for the user’s job.
3. Automated detection of unauthorized changes.
Risk to the organization can be reduced by automating the event detection and notification features to alert the organization of changes. Remediation and rollback are features that are needed to address the changes and reduce risk.
With automatic event detection and notification, key stakeholders can be alerted and the risks of unauthorized change can be reduced. Automating the notification and rollback processes are solutions that should be implemented. Capturing all activity in audit logs will help security personnel in their investigations to determine the causes of unauthorized incidents.
4. Reduce administrative workload while maintaining the process
Solutions should be sought that help to reduce workload of routine administrative activities. The appropriate tool should be implemented that will provide automated tasks for such things as user provisioning and deprovisioning, compliance reporting, routine maintenance, and other tasks that improves process adherence and helps to reduce the workload.
5. Simplify auditing and reporting.
Although Active Directory provides native auditing, it is impossible to read and challenging for most to understand. The tools used as a solution should provide easy to read and understand auditing and reporting tools. Helpful information should answer the “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when” questions when it comes to activities accessing the data. By providing this information for each event, it will be much easier for the IT staff to track specific activity.
Leveraging Active Directory to assist with auditing and authentication of your computer environment will help with standardizing security controls and policy across the different computer platforms. Going beyond the native capabilities of Active Directory to achieve automation, reduce risks, and maintain security should help make auditors, security, and IT staff very happy.
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