The organisation needed to strengthen its identity security posture across its legacy infrastructure and hybrid Active Directory environment. This initiative aimed to reduce risk exposure from unmanaged service accounts and enforce MFA for high-risk user access. It also sought to ensure consistent protection for a constantly changing network of internal staff and thousands of external advisers operating across unmanaged endpoints.

Identity risk from unmanaged service accounts

The organisation had limited visibility into their service accounts which were scattered across multiple forests and domains within a complex AD environment. Many of these accounts lacked clear ownership, had not undergone password rotation in years, or were deeply embedded in legacy processes. Without visibility into how they were used or where they were configured, the organisation could not accurately assess risks associated with each account, safely remove dormant accounts, or apply any access controls. These unmanaged identities posed a growing risk of lateral movement and credential misuse.

Gaining end-to-end visibility and control of service accounts

As a long-standing managed security service provider to the organisation, ITC Secure (ITC) guided the IT team to identify blind spots, including the adoption of Silverfort’s Identity Security Platform. This collaboration helped to accelerate deployment and ensure the solution aligned with both technical and operational goals. With Silverfort, the organisation gained end-to-end visibility into more than 550 on-premises service accounts, including many dormant and previously undocumented identities. The security team classified accounts based on usage patterns, removed those no longer in use, and applied virtual fencing policies to limit active service accounts to specific, approved access paths. This approach significantly reduced the identity attack surface while maintaining operational continuity, without requiring any infrastructure changes or rewriting legacy application code.

The company's active directory service accounts dashboard in Silverfort displays all detected service accounts, including name, source, destination, number of authentications, risk score, baseline change and other account info.

Access control gaps across internal and external users

The organisation needed to enforce consistent access policies for both internal employees and a large network of external users, many of whom accessed legacy systems from unmanaged or personal devices. Critical applications still relied on outdated authentication protocols, such as NTLM and LDAP, which made it difficult to enforce modern security controls like MFA. With thousands of users operating across a complex environment, the lack of protocol-level enforcement created significant risk exposure – especially for systems accessible over the internet.

Enforcing MFA protection across legacy applications

With Silverfort, the organisation enforced MFA protection for high-risk authentication activity across NTLM and LDAP-based applications without modifying user workflows. This enabled the IT team to implement modern identity security controls even on legacy systems that did not support native MFA integration. By gradually applying access-based policies and monitoring access behaviour through Silverfort’s Access Intelligence, the team could phase rollout across user groups, reducing disruption while strengthening security posture across the hybrid environment.

The company's active directory service accounts dashboard in Silverfort displays all detected service accounts, including name, source, destination, number of authentications, risk score, baseline change and other account info.

Balancing protection with day-to-day operations

With thousands of users, including external advisers operating across varied device types, the organisation needed to strengthen identity security without introducing friction that could interrupt day-to-day business operations. Deploying access controls at scale carried the risk of authentication failures, increased helpdesk tickets, or unintended downtime. The internal team also had to maintain service continuity across legacy systems and ensure new policies would not interfere with business-critical workflows.

Fast, frictionless deployment with immediate results

Silverfort’s unique architecture enabled the organisation to deploy identity security controls rapidly without modifying legacy applications. The IT team gained visibility into authentication activity and started to roll out access-based policies in a phased approach, enabling them to enforce MFA protection and service accounts virtual fencing with minimal disruption. This approach helped maintain user productivity while significantly improving organisation’s identity security posture. Throughout the rollout, ITC provided technical and best practice guidance, helping the internal team to configure access policies and reduce operational friction.

The company's list of access based policies that set granular access rules with MFA prompts based on user roles, access frequency, and resource sensitivity.