In every industry, Active Directory (AD) and Entra ID are the de facto standard identity directories. While cloud environments are becoming more prevalent, many industries’ governing bodies require sensitive and private data and the applications utilized by them to remain on the premises. The hybrid combination of AD and Entra ID creates a complex web of identities in domains and forests that are often managed from separate consoles, creating a costly and risky administrative challenge.
The complexity of hybrid environments often results in vulnerabilities that can put businesses at risk. These vulnerabilities take the form of privilege sprawl as a result of mergers, acquisitions, mobility within a company, and the resulting creation or addition of new identity accounts. Each individual identity account requires specific rights to access corporate resources. How those rights are allocated and protected is critical to an organization’s security and productivity. Any gaps create standing privilege, which are privileged accounts left provisioned for longer than necessary. Standing privilege can be described as an open door for threat actors – an opportunity to infiltrate your organization (often unnoticed) and move laterally or escalate privileges to inflict harm on an organization.
The Zero Trust principle of Least Privilege can help organizations reduce the risks of cybersecurity threats. It is difficult to implement and enforce and requires strategic layers and policies to ensure effectiveness in today’s evolving landscape.
Mitigate risk in a complex hybrid identity environment
Identity environments grow in complexity exponentially as businesses become more dynamic. Multiple domains and tenants, forests, and hundreds to thousands of identities from numerous 3rd party apps can be very difficult to manage consistently using manual efforts. Ensuring resource access is only provided to those who need it is also frequently accomplished via a disjointed compilation of half-baked automation tools and scripts.
Enter RBAC.
RBAC (Role Based Access Control) groups access rights into categories based on one or more specific attributes that comprise a role to streamline access and authorization. Role could be defined as attributes for job code, geographical location, manager, and more. RBAC reduces the manual effort while providing granularity of privileges to protect business-critical resources.
While RBAC can dramatically simplify access rights, it is important to take into account the fluidity of the business environment. Employees’ access needs can change frequently. An RBAC solution must be flexible and fast enough to accommodate these changes with agility and accuracy. It’s also important to take the identity lifecycle into consideration during this whole process to ensure that any changes in status will impact the governance of that identity account. Wrangling this using native tools and scripts usually results in having an aneurism, so having a 3rd party tool to manage it for you is clearly in everyone’s best interest.
Risk management using RBAC in AD
The solution to reducing risk in your environment is simple, on the surface. Ensure the right people have the right access at the right time, and eliminate obvious bad practices from your IT Security operations. It’s HOW you accomplish this feat that matters, how much time, effort, and money it ultimately costs.
When evaluating identity security and management solutions, it is important to look for RBAC capabilities coupled with other features that simplify and secure your identity environment. The most important features to look for in a solution that employs RBAC are as follows:
Dynamic and flexible group management
Fine-grained delegation
Automated policy enforcement
Identity account synchronization, and
Consolidated visibility and control for ease of use
Dynamic group management is an efficient way to assign policies and manage access rights for multiple individual identity accounts simultaneously based on role or attribute, and to adapt those rights as needed by adding and removing users from security groups automatically.
Fine-grained delegation with RBAC helps to strengthen the principle of Least Privilege, or even Zero Standing Privileges by ensuring access to resources is only provided to those who need them, with the least amount of privilege possible.
Automation simplifies and streamlines AD lifecycle management, including policy automation, and provides more consistent and effective security and management of users, groups, roles, contacts, licenses, and objects.
Synchronization of hybrid AD, Entra ID and M365 identity accounts can simplify and streamline AD management, helping you ensure consistent privilege and policy enforcement in a hybrid environment. This avoids identity fragmentation risks and enforces the principle of least privilege.
It can be burdensome to manage each tenant and domain from a separate console. Such administrative demands can drain resources and create gaps in policy enforcement. Comprehensive visibility across the entire AD/Entra ID identity ecosystem will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of privileged account management.
Conclusion: RBAC provides a more secure Identity environment
RBAC can help you solve the pain points and risk caused by identity and privilege sprawl by enabling a security-first approach. An approach focused on security addresses the complexity of a hybrid AD/Entra ID environment, the challenges of identity in a dynamic business setting, and the resource constraints inherent in environments that are growing and/or evolving. Solutions that automate and enforce best practice measures like the Principle of Least Privilege and Zero Standing Privilege will help to ensure your company does not become a cybersecurity statistic.
About the Author
Eric Hibar, Jr., Solution Engineer: A jack of all trades, and master of some, Eric has been creating solutions to solve a variety of technical challenges for customers since 2007 with Quest/One Identity. Currently focused on the AD Mgmt product suite which includes Active Roles, Password Manager, and Defender.
Eric Hibar Jr. — Solution Engineer at One Identity
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