Why should Active Directory hygiene be part of your NHI security program?
Roey Rozi
Director of Solutions Architecture
Published on
January 9, 2025
Active Directory (AD) has been around forever—and for good reason. If you’ve got a big on-prem setup, it’s the go-to for managing users, permissions, and access. But here’s the catch: AD wasn’t built for today’s hybrid and machine-driven environments, where on-prem meets cloud, and machine identities outnumber human ones by 20 to 1. That’s where things can get messy.
AD’s design revolves around human users, with a focus on single passwords and simple group structures. But machines have different needs:
Multiple Credentials: Machines often need multiple API keys or service accounts, which AD isn’t natively designed to support.
Lifecycle Complexity: Unlike human users, machine identities don’t follow predictable lifecycles. Old service accounts stick around, permissions pile up, and security risks increase.
Why You Can’t Ignore AD Hygiene when securing NHIs?
Picture this: Your team has been syncing AD with Entra to keep cloud apps running smoothly. Everything’s fine until… an important cloud app suddenly goes offline. After hours of panic and troubleshooting, the problem turns out to be an old service account no one even remembered existed.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Whether you’re balancing on-prem and cloud or moving to the cloud, neglecting AD hygiene can lead to security risks, wasted time, and plenty of frustration.
We get it—AD hygiene doesn’t exactly scream “top priority.” But here’s the thing: bad hygiene in a hybrid world can spiral into bigger problems:
Security Risks: Stale accounts and over-permissioned users are basically an open invitation for attackers.
Sync Issues: Forgotten dependencies can mess with your Entra sync, leaving apps or services out of commission.
Waste of time: Tracking all this manually? It’s exhausting, error-prone, and way too slow to keep up. As Gartner stated in IAM Hygiene: Laying the Groundwork Through Continuous Discovery (published August 20, 2024): “Manual discovery involves assessing account repositories and tracking identity data using nonautomated methods. This is an obvious candidate for automation, which requires scripting skills every IAM program should have.”
Nested Groups and Hidden Permissions: AD’s nested group structure makes it incredibly difficult to untangle permissions and track who (or what) has access to what.
Scattered Logs and Fragmented Visibility: In order to understand the entire picture, one has to ingest 100’s of GBs of logs from both Entra and from AD Domain Controllers, which requires expertise and complex engineering.
Ownership Ambiguity: Service accounts often lack clear ownership, making them harder to track, secure, and manage.
The Hidden Problem with Hybrid Setups
Hybrid environments are tricky. They come with built-in challenges:
Invisible Connections: A “retired” account might still be keeping a critical app alive.
Governance Nightmares: Scaling manual processes across hybrid environments? Not happening.
One of our retail customers learned this the hard way. Over 30% of their “inactive” accounts were actually powering important apps. Without realizing it, they almost shut down vital operations during cleanup.
How Oasis Makes AD Management Easy
Oasis takes the guesswork out of AD hygiene and gives you a real-time view of what’s happening—on-prem and in the cloud.
Here’s how we do it:
Continuous Discovery We continuously discover all accounts and entities in your AD environment, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. That old service account you thought was dead? We’ll show you it’s actually running your top cloud app. As Gartner highlighted in IAM Hygiene: Laying the Groundwork Through Continuous Discovery (published August 20, 2024): “Discovery is not a one-time event. Good hygiene requires continuous discovery, as frequently as possible. Newly created accounts and credentials are brought to the surface as soon as they appear. Focus on the highest-priority assets.”
Usage and Dependency Mapping See exactly which accounts are still in use and what they’re tied to. By mapping account usage and dependencies, we identify critical connections that might otherwise be missed.
Entitlement and Policy Management Over-permissioned accounts (hello, domain admins) are flagged for review, and we help you enforce the right entitlements and policies to reduce risks and simplify compliance.
Ownership and Attestation No more detective work. We use attributes from AD to assign clear ownership to every account, including service accounts, and streamline the attestation process so you always know who’s responsible for what.
Lifecycle Automation Managing account lifecycles manually is time-consuming and error-prone. Oasis automates lifecycle management, privilege tagging, syncing—it’s all automated, so you can focus on bigger things.
When you invest in AD hygiene with Oasis, you’re not just cleaning up—you’re leveling up:
Stronger Security: No stale accounts. No extra permissions. Just a smaller attack surface.
Fewer Headaches: Automation takes the grunt work out of managing AD.
Cloud Confidence: Visibility into your AD environment makes migrations and hybrid setups way smoother.
One CIO told us their last audit was “shockingly easy” thanks to Oasis. Instead of juggling outdated spreadsheets and half-baked reports, they had everything ready in a few clicks.
It’s Time to Rethink AD Hygiene
Active Directory doesn’t have to be a burden. With Oasis, you can clean it up, keep it secure, and actually make it work for you—whether you’re on-prem, in the cloud, or somewhere in between.
