Many enterprises have a variety of aspects that make up their networks, like Windows Defender Firewall, GPOs, and an AD infrastructure. Vulnerabilities in any part of the network can have a domino effect; once the first domino falls, the entire trail will go down with it, which can cause irrevocable damage to your network.

Compromising privileged accounts is the penultimate objective of most cyberattacks — once attackers gain privileged access, they can then accomplish their final goal, whether that’s to steal or encrypt information assets or disrupt business operations. Typically, cybercriminals gain a foothold in a network by compromising of a low-level account on a local machine.

Directories, particularly your Microsoft directories, are where it all starts. Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly, Azure AD) contain accounts, computers and resources that form the cornerstone of your IT security infrastructure. At One Identity, we are speaking with more and more organizations coming to the realization that Active Directory, however "legacy", is more crucial than ever.

The installation of Active Directory (AD) on Windows Server 2019 calls for a thorough understanding of technical nuances and a steadfast dedication to security best practices. This guide will walk you through the process of securely implementing Active Directory, ensuring the highest level of protection for the information and resources within your company.

Do your house guests still have access to your home after they’ve left, or overstayed their welcome? No, right? You would throw them out or take the keys back because they no longer require access. Guests in Azure are like house guests. Once they no longer need access, it's then time to take back the key so they no longer have access to the company's data and connected apps. Yet many organizations are inadvertently leaving themselves at risk of supply chain attacks.

In my days of AD administration, there was always a need for a select set of sysadmins to be granted high levels of permissions. In AD, this is typically a separate user admin account that is a member of the Domain Admins Active Directory group. There are a few other groups that are highly privileged(i.e. Enterprise Admins and Schema Admins) but the permissions required by these groups are generally more specific and therefore less populated.

Imagine being named XYZ in a crowd of other XYZs – a purposeless name that creates confusion and does not communicate a purpose, adding to the cognitive pile of everyone’s day-to-day tasks. Similarly, Active Directory groups created by users need to have logical names so that current and future users do not find themselves stuck in a pickle.