Imanami: Hassle-Free Active Directory Group Management

We make sure that your keyring contains only the keys you need,” he quips. To paint a clearer picture, Blackwell mentions one of Imanami’s clients—a branch manager at a large San Francisco-based bank—that needed access to a vault in Oakland after being transferred. While to ensure optimum productivity they were granted access to the vault in Oakland, what was dismissed is the fact that they still hold access to the vault in San Francisco, which might spawn significant problems in future. To address such concerns, GroupID leverages HR resource data to smartly automate the provisioning and deprovisioning of users, allowing IT professionals to quickly enter users in the distribution and security groups and easily manage them across multiple systems.

To add to that, attestation plays an important role when it comes to strategically managing Active Directory groups. However, without proper enforcement of group lifecycle, attestation becomes irrelevant since it would entail no consequences for group owners. With the help of GroupID, users can initiate an expiration/renewal lifecycle for groups, which in turn, necessitates stakeholders to share the responsibility of groups, maintain their accuracy, and avoid a group glut by getting rid of the ones no longer required. “Lifecycle is the key to ensuring that no group, user, or object is created in perpetuity and outlives its purpose,” asserts Blackwell.

To exemplify the benefits and value Imanami brings to the table, Haaverson recalls a client engagement wherein his company worked in close collaboration with a premium Telco organization to assist them with Active Directory and identity and access management. The client had an entire help desk dedicated to dealing with Active Directory problems and making necessary changes. However, when an email storm severely hindered the productivity of the client’s business, Imanami came to their rescue. The root of the issue was an unofficial email sent out accidentally to a large group of about 100,000 people that are using the fax server. The problem multiplied as other members of the group responded to the same mail and replied to all, resulting in massive internal spam. While employees using modern email systems were equipped to handle the email overload, the situation was critical in remote offices operating on satellite links. Imanami stepped in and started with locking the group down and then deployed GroupID to address the problem holistically, allowing the help desk staff to focus on more mission-critical IT tasks.

The core of Imanami’s uniqueness lies in its multi-layered approach to managing Active Directory comprehensively through automation, lifecycle enforcement for efficient attestation, and delegation. Besides, GroupID also brings the potential to control and manage both on-premise and cloud-based directory along with any of the associated applications. As businesses incline more toward cloud services and applications, be it a hybrid environment or completely cloud-based, GroupID is poised to align with the demand. “For instance, internally we use GroupID hosted in Azure while our customers run our platform on AWS or some other hosted environment as well as data centers,” explains Haaverson. Also, to further strengthen the attestation process, Imanami has plans to enhance the capabilities of its software suite for revealing how groups are being used to perform important tasks and provide customers with insights on that.