By successfully bridging their on-prem and cloud environments, the London Borough of Waltham Forest is pleased to have all their user logs and authentication details in one place.

“By utilizing Silverfort’s bridging feature, we are now receiving all identity-related logs, including Active Directory logs, in one single pane of glass, making it possible for service desk staff to look at log-on events in one place. This has been extremely useful and is another significant benefit of the Silverfort platform,” Humphreys said.

• MFA protection implemented on all on-prem environments and admin users in a few hours

• Complete visibility into all user authentication flows

• Bridged all on-prem users and policies to Entra ID

• MFA protection for all privileged admin accounts

• Limited visibility into user authentication flows

• Rapid procurement of a solution that works with Microsoft

After observing Silverfort's identity security capabilities in action within their environment, the Borough realized they wanted to integrate Silverfort into their security stack.

“As a result of a smooth POC and my creation of a business use case report for our senior management to approve, we received approval to purchase Silverfort via the Azure Marketplace,” explained Humphreys.

As an enterprise Microsoft 365 and Azure customer, Waltham Forest sought a security solution that would integrate seamlessly with their existing Microsoft suite.

“From an identity perspective, we are heavily onboarded into Entra MFA, and we were specifically looking for a solution that would allow us to extend it to our on-prem Active Directory.”

To ensure consistency across its entire environment, Waltham Forest wanted to extend the Entra ID security controls across all on-prem policies.

In addition to extending Entra MFA to their privileged admin users, Waltham Forest is also using Silverfort’s Windows Login capabilities. “We also deployed the Silverfort Windows Login MFA feature which has been of great value for us. The Silverfort Windows Login provides the best authentication experience, as it makes the overall authentication process more seamless and intuitive,” said Humphreys.

Understanding the identity security challenges in their environment, this accelerated the search for a solution to meet the Borough’s security needs. “Due to the large number of admin accounts that are used by our technology support staff, we became very focused on protecting individuals rather than just the applications they utilize. This required us to also protect specific authentication protocols, which our privileged admins were using. This new focus highlighted the need for an identity security solution that would help us apply MFA protection to our privileged admin users,” added Humphreys.

After ransomware attacks targeted a number of schools in the borough, the London Borough of Waltham Forest was contacted by a specific school to help understand what had happened and assist the school with their recovery.

“Some schools were targeted with cyberattacks in June last year, and we were asked to assist one of them in recovering and understanding what happened. We quickly determined that corporate admin credentials had been compromised by malicious actors who ran a phishing campaign to obtain access to user credentials. The findings identified that the school had a major security gap with their admin-privileged accounts with regard to MFA,” said Lee Humphreys, Infrastructure Security Architect at London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Drawing from their experience working with the school, Waltham Forest knew they needed to improve their identity security posture.

After deploying Silverfort into their production environment and applying access policies to their privileged admin accounts, the Borough have experienced a nice return on their investment.

"It’s amazing how simple it was to deploy Silverfort – it only took a few hours to get up and running," stated Humphreys. Shortly after we configured and applied five MFA policies for our admin accounts, we could see through the Silverfort logs that every admin was required to authenticate with Entra MFA to access any on-prem resource," stated Humphreys.