Active Directory is dead, long live Active Directory

If you were to look at topics being covered at Microsoft’s conferences, announcements, or social media one could easily assume that Active Directory (AD) is dead.  It is correct that many organizations are embracing SaaS solutions and are going through digital transformations.  While all of this is true, we are still at the beginning of the process that will take a long time to get the majority of workloads and organizations to become cloud only.  You only need to look at mainframe usage and that Windows XP still comprises ~ 1.6% of PC operating systems to understand that organizations resist changes and computing paradigm shifts can take decades, and some things won’t change.

There is no question that the move to cloud is well underway and is accelerating.  This means that a hybrid and multi cloud systems are the reality for most and will be for some time with AD as the primary identity store.  Many organizations use AD Connect to sync their on-prem users to Azure Active Directory (AAD) for Office / Microsoft 365 (M365).  All of this means that you still need to keep track of what is happening in AD to make sure is stays secure.  Recent cyber attacks, namely the Solarwinds breach got bad actors into on-prem systems where they moved laterally, elevated permissions to eventually gained access to M365 resources.

 

Cygna Auditor has the flexibility to gather events with or without an agent from both trusted and untrusted forests while also allowing you to control where and how long the audit data is kept.  Monitoring AD changes alone will not be sufficient to maintain security and availability in a hybrid system.  You will also need to closely keep track of activities of your cloud connected systems.  Even though AD has been around for a long time, your auditing solution doesn’t need to be dated as well.  We are running a limited time campaign for you to Switch to Cygna Auditor.  Ask us to see what a modern hybrid auditing solution can do for your organization.