Active Directory Assessment

The review validates privileged access design, service account boundaries, and delegation against tier rules across administrative and operational roles. Closing over-privileged routes reduces compromise blast radius and gives organizations a role-based cleanup plan with clear ownership, phased rollout order, and measurable threat reduction checkpoints for each privileged path.

Your Andersen team examines Active Directory configuration baselines, how Group Policy settings are configured, and inheritance behavior across organizational units with mixed control ownership. By identifying disabled or unlinked Group Policy Objects (GPOs), we prevent policy drift and improve control consistency across the Active Directory infrastructure and connected production resources, so engineers reduce rollback likelihood during correction work.

We examine trust relationships across forest structures and trust boundaries, including transitive links and connections involving top-level Organizational Units (OUs) in complex multi-domain structures. Preventing cross-forest abuse reduces exposure from unintended relationships and provides a trust hardening guide with rollback-safe change sequencing and priority actions for critical trust paths.

The evaluation targets Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) templates, enrollment rights, and issuance controls to uncover certificate-based escalation and hidden privilege paths. Certificate-based persistence is blocked, while template-level fixes lower the identity threat level without interrupting business services and include safe migration guidance for sensitive templates.

The hybrid evaluation covers sync and federation dependencies across Active Directory (AD) and Azure AD (now Entra ID) to detect control drift between cloud and on-premises authentication layers. Removing hybrid blind spots reduces token abuse potential and gives your organization a unified governance baseline for access monitoring, policy alignment, and action planning.

The assessment covers Kerberos delegation, NT LAN Manager (NTLM) fallback, Service Principal Name (SPN) hygiene, and credential exposure of user and service identities across business-critical services. Hardening actions reduce relay and ticket abuse, limit privilege misuse, and give technical specialists clear validation steps, exception handling guidance, and dependency-aware rollout order.

The hardening assessment checks network-connected domain controllers, hardening baselines, patch levels, and privileged logon controls for on-premises and hybrid environments with different operational constraints. Takeover potential is reduced, resilience under attacks is improved, and your engineers get a checklist with estimated hours, validation milestones, and phased implementation guidance that fits production change windows.

Our detection gap analysis inspects event coverage, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) forwarding, and alert logic for credential abuse and unauthorized privilege changes across critical systems and admin tiers. Closing monitoring gaps reduces attacker dwell time and gives your specialists priority detection rules, escalation runbooks, and tuning guidance linked to practical response actions.

The readiness assessment examines forest recovery procedures, restore testing, and recovery sequencing for directory-critical systems, so organizations limit disruption after compromise with a tested recovery plan, roles, timelines, and validation criteria for fast response under incident pressure.