Unlocking identity visibility for Microsoft environments
Another quarter, another strategic merger or company acquisition for your high-growth organization. It's great that the business is doing well and expanding its presence and portfolio in a highly competitive business environment, but you know what comes next. Weeks (maybe months) of tech stack integrations, license review, cybersecurity assessments, data mapping—it's an enormous task that is critical for the ultimate success of the transaction. But, for you, it's just a lot of pressure to get all your ducks in a row.
From an identity standpoint, you need to know exactly who (or what) is operating inside each environment, what they are doing, where they have access, and which are redundant and can be retired. This would be difficult even if both organizations relied on the same identity provider. But you're a Microsoft shop, and the acquired company, a midsized business, operates mainly in the cloud across multiple providers. Managing identities is going to be difficult across disparate tools, and you're operating on a short timeline in order to meet FTC deadlines.
It's not just mergers and acquisitions that cause identity sprawl. Other business initiatives—from dynamic supply chains to hybrid workforces to scaling agentic operations—require complete visibility into the identities operating in your environments.
Most organizations do not have visibility into the identities in their environments
For decades, Microsoft Entra ID and Active Directory have served as a trusted identity foundation across productivity, cloud, devices, and access workflows—giving organizations familiar administration, Microsoft-native workflows, and access to a broad portfolio of identity capabilities. However, the world has changed. Agile workflows run across hybrid environments in on-premises data centers and multiple providers. Data flows across systems and applications, using the fastest, most reliable, and most secure network path. Users log on from anywhere, using Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms to communicate, collaborate, and get work done. And the rapid rate of acquisitions has made IT uniformity a rarity in the business world.
It's clear that today's environments have evolved broader than a single identity plane, and giving users access to the tools and information they need may now rely on access paths that do not pass directly through Entra policy evaluation or use the same device context. This decentralized, constantly evolving landscape makes it nearly impossible (and certainly cost and time prohibitive) to gain visibility into all the identities operating inside your environments.
According to an informal poll conducted by Cisco, 80% of security professionals do not have complete or centralized visibility into the identities operating across their IT environments. Think about that. The majority of security teams have limited understanding of who or what is in their environments, what resources they are accessing, or even if they are who they say they are. Identity visibility is so important to many IT and business functions—including workforce management, supply chains, partner relations, customer support, compliance, agentic operations, and, yes, mergers and acquisitions—that identity sprawl can be a major business disruptor.
Take the mergers and acquisitions scenario highlighted above. Identity sprawl—and the inability to see all identities that are operating across your environments—can quickly derail a successful integration. Existing policies need to be expanded to new identities. New policies need to be created. Identity lifecycles (the normal flow of joiner/mover/leaver) need to be refined and governed according to evolving business needs. And, any unnecessary risk needs to be identified and cleaned up, so vulnerabilities aren't exposed and exploited by enterprising threat actors in the future. It's an enormous task with incredible responsibility, but the ultimate success of the acquisition will come down to whether you can successfully identify, track, and control the identities now operating across multiple providers.
Identity visibility enables the business
Thankfully, the solution doesn't require organizations to start over and rip out and replace existing Microsoft identity services infrastructure. In fact, Cisco Duo works alongside Entra to extend identity visibility across hybrid infrastructure, diverse devices, third-party users, and applications or access paths that are not managed directly by Microsoft cloud identity services. Consolidated on a single dashboard in Cisco Identity Intelligence this identity context can be used by security teams to identify issues such as missing MFA enrollment, dormant accounts, stale guests, excess privilege, and identity drift.
A single view of identities across the organization helps recognize risk, strengthens protection against today's AI-powered threats, and makes it easier to meet compliance requirements. And this, in turn, makes it easier to support an agile workforce, digital transformation initiatives, dynamic supply chains, and everything else that makes a modern organization run smoothly.
And that aggressive acquisition strategy that allows the organization to grab market share, and improve competitive differentiation? Well, better visibility improves that, too—even without having to replace your existing Microsoft investments.
Don't let identity sprawl impact the way IT supports business initiatives. Learn how you can unlock identity visibility across your hybrid environments with Cisco Duo.