This article originally appeared on Quest Software’s official blog, HERE. It may come as a surprise that for many years the concept of least privilege was foreign in a Windows network. It would not have been uncommon in the past…
Active Directory Management (Part 2) – How automated and enhanced AD management tools sharpen federal cybersecurity
In our last article, the GovCyberHub sat down with Eric Weiss, Sr. Technology Executive at Quest Software Public Sector, Inc., to examine the current state of federal agencies’ Active Directory environments. This week, Eric returns to take a deep dive…
AD migration and consolidation (Part 2)—The tools and best practices federal agencies should employ to reach their desired end-states
In our last article, the GovCyberHub sat down with Quest Software’s Chris Esler to examine the reasons why federal agencies migrate and consolidate their Active Directory (AD) environments, as well as delve into the many different benefits these processes deliver…
AD consolidation and migration (Part 1)—What federal agencies need to plan for and consider beforehand
As federal IT continues to evolve, it is not uncommon for government agencies to reorganize how they conduct business to match the pace of advancements in technologies. Add into the mix that administrations and leadership can change every four years,…
3 ways federal agencies can optimize and strengthen their user authentication methods
Cloud computing services and applications have surprisingly been around since the late-1990s and have slowly been adopted across federal government agencies since then. But when COVID-19 took the world by storm in 2020, this crawling pace had to change as…
Why the federal government’s lagging MFA adoption rate poses severe cyber risks to agency networks
According to Microsoft’s Vice President of Identity Security, Alex Weinert, only 25 percent of organizations today have adopted multi-factor authentication (MFA) as part of their overall cybersecurity infrastructure. That is a shining statistic when compared to 2017’s adoption rate of…
4 ways agencies can protect themselves from cyber attacks in Microsoft directory services
As technology has evolved, so has the adoption and use of next-generation cloud platforms. Over the years, federal government agencies have adopted a multitude of cloud platforms to facilitate more efficient workflows and to create a more secure environment for…
How the NIST Framework sets out to protect federal agencies’ AD environments
February 2021 was a moment in time where federal agencies were knee deep in modernizing their IT infrastructures to accommodate the digitized new normal of their processes, workflows, and services. But while the federal government was busy digitally transforming their…
Emerging threats against workload identities in Azure AD and what federal agencies should do about it
Throughout the last decade, identity theft has become a gold mine for cybercriminals, due to vulnerabilities that accompany all of the emerging technologies that organizations and individuals use in everyday life. Many people are already aware that theft is a…
12 Privileged Access Management best practices for federal agencies
No matter what risks a federal government agency is facing, you can draw a threat vector from that risk to a privileged account. Privileged accounts are the backbone of any operating agency, so it’s vital that these accounts are protected…
