Why is identity protection so important?
It goes without saying that identities – and the infrastructure that supports them – are critical to enterprises providing uninterrupted business continuity. Without the ability to safely and effectively authenticate to the business systems and applications used across the enterprise, no organization can maintain operational success. Active Directory is the most commonly deployed identity provider solution in use by over 90% of all organizations1 today to provide centralized authentication and privileged group management for users, devices, applications, and services. It is also a prime target for malicious actors. And while many organizations have begun migrating to cloud-first or hybrid solutions like Azure AD, this has only made the identity infrastructure more complex to manage while providing adversaries an even larger attack surface against which to launch malicious reconnaissance in attempts to compromise and control the ‘keys to the kingdom.’ In fact, based on the analysis of incident response investigations, misconfigurations in these hybrid identity deployments have resulted in wide-scale privilege escalation, lateral/vertical movement, and persistence by adversaries and malicious insider threat actors.
