ASAP Holding GmbH is a German engineering service provider that delivers engineering and technology solutions to major car manufacturers across Europe. As a TISAX- and ISO-certified organization, ASAP Holding supports its clients with high-compliance design, development, and production services, operating at the forefront of secure automotive innovation.

ASAP Holding operates in a highly regulated automotive vertical, where identity security is critical to maintaining trusted partnerships with global manufacturers. They have a hybrid IT environment, with approximately 95% of workloads on-prem, including file shares, domain controllers, and legacy systems that support critical operations.

As part of compliance mandates under TISAX 6.0 and ISO 27001, ASAP needed to enforce strict access controls on sensitive file data and gain full visibility into who could access what and how.

With the domains migration and hybrid environment scaling up, ASAP Holding noticed growing service account activity that became hard to manage. While maintaining strict naming conventions, they discovered that some user accounts were being misused as shadow service accounts, adding risk to their compliance posture.

As part of compliance mandates under TISAX 6.0 and ISO 27001, ASAP needed to enforce strict access controls on sensitive file data and gain full visibility into who could access what and how.

ASAP Holding began its search with a clear objective: find a solution that could deliver fast protection for their on-prem systems, including security for legacy authentication protocols like CIFS, RDP and SSH.

ASAP Holding was introduced to Silverfort by their long-time IT security partner Protea Networks. Hannes Kuffner, Managing Director of Protea Networks, recommended the platform as a lightweight alternative to traditional identity security tools.

Following internal approval, the ASAP Holding team began rolling out Silverfort across their hybrid environment. Within one week, they were fully deployed in production, securing access to legacy servers, RDP, SSH, and homegrown applications without rewriting code or disrupting operations. As part of compliance mandates under TISAX 6.0 and ISO 27001, ASAP needed to enforce strict access controls on sensitive file data and gain full visibility into who could access what and how.

The team focused first on enforcing MFA protection for high-risk access paths, applying policies to legacy systems and critical infrastructure. With Silverfort’s Authentication Firewall, ASAP Holding blocked unauthorized access attempts and met the technical controls outlined in both TISAX and ISO 27001.

"Silverfort acts like an Active Directory Authentication Firewall. It secures everything that talks to the domain controller with MFA, group access policies, or deny rules. That’s how we locked down SSH, file shares, and more," said Nosse

From there, ASAP Holding shifted their focus to protecting their service accounts. Although the team had strong naming conventions in place, Silverfort uncovered 244 accounts behaving like service accounts, including several standard user accounts being misused in automated processes. With this complete visibility, ASAP Holding built behavioural baselines and fenced access where appropriate.

To complete the deployment, ASAP Holding integrated Silverfort with their Splunk SIEM solution, so identity-based events, including blocked authentications, legacy protocol use, and privilege changes, flowed directly into their detection and response workflows for faster remediation and higher confidence.

ASAP Holding now treats Silverfort as a core part of their identity security architecture, especially in place of a traditional PAM tool.

The team also extended MFA protection to SSH-based infrastructure. Silverfort now protects not just user access, but machine-level authentications tied to production systems.

Looking ahead, ASAP Holding plans to continue evolving its identity strategy as more workloads shift to the cloud. For now, their focus remains on maintaining strong coverage across on-prem, resources, and preserving full control over how data is processed - a key requirement in the European automotive sector.

"One of Silverfort’s biggest strengths is that everything is processed on-prem. No data leaves our environment. That’s critical for us, and we appreciate how the platform is designed with that in mind,” said Nosse.