300 Words On Active Directory Security On a Friday Afternoon

“If you don’t get Active Directory security right, you’re not going to get security right”—Agree or disagree; explain in 300 words and show your work.

Agreed, says NetIQ. NetIQ product managers spoke to us recently about security and NetIQ products. The company has recently done several things to position itself more firmly in the Active Directory (AD) and security arena. To its Directory and Resource Administrator, it’s added the most granular auditing and reporting available on the market, the company says. And it added automation to help customers more efficiently provision, deprovision, and, in this era of layoffs, reprovision employees.

The company also announced a partnership with Centrify, maker of the DirectControl and DirectAuthorize solutions that enable security across AD and non-Windows environments. That partnership grew out of a realization that maintaining and managing identities across heterogeneous systems can be difficult, to say the least.

NetIQ sees its customers facing several challenges:  how to secure critical info, how to meet compliance requirements, and how to monitor activity of users. Organizations are increasingly relying on AD to help them drive down admin costs and secure data while at the same time they’re realizing what a wealth of information is available  in AD—potentially available to the wrong person with the wrong motivation to use it. The trend will continue to need to manage identities more broadly across platforms, and companies will need to address automating AD functions for security and to save admin time. Additionally, as more companies start using Microsoft SharePoint, they’ll need to decide how to manage and secure the wealth of data it contains.