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In any organization with an Active Directory managed Windows environment, applications and services need to run with the appropriate Windows user identities to access privileged shared resources. This is achieved with the help of service accounts in the organization. The service accounts establish the applications' and services' access and permission levels to the local and network resources, including the Microsoft Active Directory. Since the Active Directory serves as the identity provider in many organizations, any unauthorized and undetected changes to the Active Directory leave the organization vulnerable to security threats.

Service accounts themselves can be privileged accounts, wherein, they are assigned special permissions to perform critical operations in the organization, including changes to the Active Directory. Service accounts are an integral part of an organization and it is essential to manage and monitor their activities. However, the following are some challenges in managing service accounts:

  • Service accounts can exist and run on any number of client machines, server machines, and domain controllers in the organization's domain. Therefore, manually monitoring the details and activities of service accounts is a tedious process.

  • When a service account password expires or is changed, the applications and services dependent on the service account stop functioning till they are reconfigured with the new password. If the administrators do not have information on where a service account is used, then, manually checking every machine for the application and services using the service account and updating the applications and services with the new password is time-consuming and susceptible to errors. This often results in an increase in the business downtime and a decrease in the throughput, which is not an optimal scenario for the organization. Setting a service account to never expire, or never changing the password for the account is not a solution as it increases the chances of the account being compromised.

Because of these challenges, the task of managing service accounts in organizations is often not conducted, paving the way for security attacks.

The OpenText Active Directory Administrator helps overcome these challenges.

The OpenText Active Directory Administrator is a powerful solution that provides a visualization of the service accounts and their activity, including changes to the Active Directory, in an organization. This helps administrators gain insights into how robust their organization is against security threats and take necessary actions to avoid potential threats.