The customer had spent the last few years growing through mergers and acquisitions with other healthcare organizations, each of which had their own separate, unique environments. All were utilizing Microsoft technologies for their modern work capabilities, with Active Directory and related on-premises applications.

The Sentinel team conducted a thorough, three-phase assessment to determine the current state of the customer’s Active Directory services across several environments and uncover any potential challenges and/or opportunities for efficiencies they may encounter during the consolidation process.

The first phase focused on information gathering, which involved collecting data from the customer’s various domains and conducting extensive interviews with over 25 key team members to provide context for the assessment. The second phase included an in-depth analysis of the domains to assess risk levels, looking for end of life and nonfunctional elements, misconfigurations, gaps in governance, as well as misuse of policies. Once the major risks had been identified, Sentinel provided the customer with tactical and strategic recommendations they could adopt prior to starting the domain consolidation process.

Sentinel’s comprehensive assessment of the customer’s various environments found several areas and domains that either required significant investment, reprioritization of resources, or less ambitious goals for the consolidation project. Many of the insights were ones the customer was not aware of prior to this assessment. They included tactical recommendations to conduct regular exercises and testing, set standards for operational processes, create a process to continually improve monitoring, and establish a plan on what to do with end-of-life architectures and systems. As identity services form the core of modern and secure systems, this assessment helped the customer better understand the need to clearly define their vision for identity services moving forward. Sentinel also strongly advised the customer to document corporate practices for recurring operational IT maintenance, procedures to ensure consistent implementation of security requirements, and configuration items as well as procedures to measure compliance.

The customer expressed sincere gratitude for Sentinel’s expertise and thorough analysis, as it enabled them to develop a well-defined strategy moving forward that would ensure a smooth and secure migration process from several environments to a single environment. They further engaged with Sentinel to assist them in following through with the recommendations.