Most organizations today operate in a hybrid identity world: cloud-first strategies powered by on-premises Active Directory foundations. While the destination is cloud-native, the journey requires securing the infrastructure you have today, and that means gaining visibility into AD.
That's why we're thrilled to announce that Okta Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) now supports Active Directory on-premises integration, bringing the same deep security insights that have transformed cloud identity security to your most critical identity infrastructure.
The Critical Questions Security Teams Face
Security teams consistently grapple with the same urgent questions:
- Which AD accounts and groups have elevated permissions?
- What admin accounts aren't in use?
- What service accounts exist in my AD environment?
- Which accounts have old or weak passwords?
These aren't just operational questions. They're security incidents waiting to happen.
Why Active Directory Security Can't Wait
Active Directory was introduced in 2000, yet it remains a core identity provider for organizations. Industry analysis shows that approximately 90% of Fortune 1000 companies use it as a primary method for authentication and authorization. It continues to run critical business processes, systems, and applications that are too important or complex to migrate entirely to the cloud.
Most companies keep AD alive and sync accounts into cloud IdPs, but fear shutting it down since decommissioning AD requires a complete understanding of privileged accounts, service accounts, nested groups, and dependencies. Without full visibility, organizations fear outages, downtime, or security gaps.
But this lack of visibility isn't just an IT operations concern. It's a security liability. An overly permissive group can quietly grant hundreds of users administrative rights across servers, databases, and business apps, significantly increasing the organization's attack surface. A compromised service account, often running with Domain Admin privileges, never expiring its password, can give attackers unrestricted access for months, if not years, without detection. This detection failure is a critical gap, as industry reports indicate 84% of breached organizations had evidence of the incident in their event logs.
What You Can Do with ISPM's Active Directory Integration
Service Account Discovery: ISPM automatically identifies service accounts across your AD environment, eliminating guesswork and manual inventory processes. You'll finally see what service accounts exist, their privilege levels, and security posture.
Nested Group Analysis: ISPM maps your complete group hierarchy, showing you exactly which groups grant admin rights and how permissions flow through nested relationships. No more surprises about who has access to what.
Hybrid Environment Insights: ISPM provides side-by-side visibility between your AD and cloud IdPs, instantly showing which accounts are synced and which remain unmanaged in AD. You can identify and clean up forgotten accounts before they become security risks.
Privileged Account Management: Detect and manage privileged human and service accounts to prevent excessive permissions and limit attack surfaces before they become breach vectors.
On-going Monitoring: Rather than periodic manual reviews, ISPM provides on-going monitoring for stale accounts, unchanged passwords, and privilege drift, alerting you to issues as they develop.
Instant AD Visibility: The Power of the Unified Okta Platform
Getting started is incredibly simple for existing Okta customers. ISPM utilizes the existing Okta AD agent, allowing you to integrate AD domains into ISPM with just three clicks. No additional agents, no complex setup. If you're already using Okta with Active Directory, you can have complete visibility into your AD security posture in minutes.
Ready to Secure Your Active Directory?
Active Directory integration with ISPM is available now as Early Access. Contact your Okta representative to learn how ISPM can bring modern security insights to your most critical identity infrastructure, explore our integration documentation to get started, or learn more at okta.com/products/identity-security-posture-management.
