With 2022 around the corner, many want to hit the ground running and make the new year different from the last. If you’ve also been preparing for a productive year and scaling your organization up, this blog will bring you up to speed on the major security trends of 2021 you should know about.

With ADManager Plus, you can easily adapt to these new trends and be ready to take on any IAM challenge in 2022. For now, here are the major IAM trends of 2021:

  1. Unified permission management
    Improper management of file servers, their permissions, and who is accessing them is almost as bad as allowing anyone to walk into your organization and access any sensitive document they want. The prominence of remote work makes permission and access management even more critical since users are at higher risk when they’re outside their organization’s security perimeter. Additionally, admins have to focus on providing and revoking time-based permissions as needed, which is time-consuming when done manually for multiple file servers. For these reasons, it’s prudent not only to automate the management of file server permissions or manage permissions in bulk but also have a centralized console to manage multiple file servers at once.

    With out-of-the-box support for managing NTFS and share permissions of file servers in bulk, including NetApp, Isilon, and Cluster Shared Volumes, ADManager Plus allows you stay on top of all your file servers and ensure critical data can only be accessed by those who should, when they should.

  2. Help desk-driven IAM
    As organizations scale up, help desk ticket volume grows alongside them. IT help desk tickets for password resets, user account lockouts, and user provisioning often involve switching between the help desk console and other applications. This is not only time-consuming but also causes productivity to stagnate. An efficient solution to this is to integrate the help desk and your IAM solutions.

    ADManager Plus makes this simpler by integrating with popular help desk solutions like ServiceNow, Jira, Zendesk, and ServiceDesk Plus Cloud. This allows your help desk technicians to perform important identity management tasks like creating, deleting, enabling, disabling, or unlocking a user account; resetting passwords; and more from within their help desk console.

  1. Hybrid identity management
    To adapt to the widespread implementation of hybrid work that happened in the last year or so, organizations are adopting cloud solutions at a rapid rate. For services like Microsoft 365, a hybrid identity model with directory synchronization is the way forward. But managing user accounts in a hybrid environment has become a struggle for many admins; since the native AD and Azure AD tools aren’t equipped to do this, making the switch to a tool like ADManager Plus can make admins’ jobs easier.

    With a host of new Microsoft 365 management and reporting capabilities added this year, ADManager Plus makes managing, synchronizing, and reporting on both on-premises and cloud AD and Microsoft 365 user accounts a breeze.

  2. Granular delegation
    According to this report, cybercrime costs are predicted to inflict damages worth $10.5 trillion globally by 2025. With security risks continuously on the rise, securing AD from privilege abuse has become a top priority for all organizations. The most efficient way to tackle this problem is by implementing security principles like the principle of least privilege and role-based access control as standard practices throughout the organization. While native tools support secure delegation, they still fall short when it comes to granular delegation and defining flexible administrative limits.

    With its OU-based delegation capability, ADManager Plus adds deep granularity and flexibility to delegation. You can now securely delegate IAM tasks to technicians, and stay on top of their actions with purpose-built technician audit reports and real-time alerts.

ManageEngine ADManager Plus is a web-based IAM solution equipped with the capabilities needed to tackle day-to-day IAM challenges with ease. With an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, ADManager Plus handles a variety of complex tasks and helps administrators manage and report on their AD, Exchange Server, Office 365, and Google Workspace environments, all from a single console. Here’s a fully-functional, 30-day trial to get you started!