Since 2012, Jonathan Blackwell, an engineer and innovator, has provided engineering leadership that has put GroupID at the forefront of group and user management for Active Directory and Azure AD environments. His experience in development, marketing, and sales allows Jonathan to fully understand the Identity market and how buyers think.
Privileged Account Management (PAM) is a key part of any security strategy. For those of you who may not be familiar with it, PAM focuses on improving the security of privileged accounts and providing more controlled access to those accounts — from an account with Enterprise Admin rights all the way down to an account…
As your organization has grown, so has your IT infrastructure. You now have so many systems requiring some level of authentication, and so many protected data sets that need to be protected, that your organization has come to the realization that it’s time: You need to implement IAM. At first, this can be an exciting…
I’ve written and spoken many times about the topic of Shadow IT. It’s a tech buzz phrase with a somewhat negative connotation, indicating that users are taking IT matters into their own hands and bypassing IT to solve their own challenges. For the record, when a user does this and their actions put the organization…
Unless you’ve been living in an IT-less cave for the last 16 years, you’re probably well aware of the Managed By field in an Active Directory group, as well as the option to allow that specified manager to update group membership. When Microsoft created those fields, the intention was surely to help organizations distribute the…
Everyone’s worried about endpoints. And you should. As evidenced by the rise in organizations experiencing attacks via malware-laden websites, phishing and spear phishing, and OS/application vulnerabilities, the endpoint is a clear target for external attackers. Compromising an endpoint is frequently the first step needed to gain a foothold within your organization’s network, giving these attackers…
When we talk about consolidating Active Directory groups, we refer to the process of cleaning up the clutter of groups accumulated over the years, so that only the relevant groups exist in the directory. Consolidating Active Directory groups is one of the most daunting tasks that IT administrators must undertake. Poor cleanup procedures can expose…
Who’s in charge here, anyway? Even if you have only a modicum of proper group management in place, your groups should at very least have some documentation of (a) how a given group is being used in the Notes field and (b) who is responsible for the group in the Managed By field, for the…
If you’re like most IT professionals, you don’t bother to update an Active Directory group’s membership. What’s the big deal? You may have read our articles about the realities of IT not focusing on groups or about the importance of putting some basic management in place — or better yet, a full group management lifecycle…
According to the 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, approximately 85% of data breaches are performed by an external threat actor, with approximately 45% of those breaches focusing on credentials. This makes sense. Without proper credentials, the threat actor won’t be able to access the target data they want. Most threat actors gain entry by…
When’s the last time you actually managed your Active Directory groups? Be honest. We’re not talking about that last time you added someone to a group. We’re talking about the last time you actually did some homework to ensure that the group had the right members, that the permissions were assigned correctly, etc. It’s probably…