The Challenges of Identity Governance in Complex Active Directory (AD) Environments

Read full article here: https://claritysecurity.com/clarity-blog/identity-governance-challenges-in-complex-active-directory-environments/?source=nhimg

For many enterprises, Active Directory (AD) has grown into a tangled web of domains, nested groups, and hybrid on-premises/cloud  deployments. Mergers, acquisitions, and organic growth have created multi-domain environments that are almost impossible to “clean up” without massive cost and disruption. Security best practices may advise against nested groups or multiple domains, but the reality is simple: organizations must govern AD as it exists today, not as the textbooks suggest.

The Core Challenges

1. Hybrid Complexity
   • Synchronization issues between on-prem AD and Azure Entra ID.
   • Different capabilities across platforms make unified policy enforcement difficult.
   • Inconsistent access policies across hybrid setups.

2. Nested Groups
   • Useful for administration but lead to opaque permissions.
   • Hard to troubleshoot or audit access paths.
   • Limited Azure Entra support, especially in app roles and licensing.

3. Multi-Domain Environments
   • Complex cross-domain identity management.
   • Difficulty applying consistent governance.
   • Consolidation of identity data for reviews is resource-heavy.

4. RBAC Gaps
   • Azure Entra ID doesn’t allow AD groups in Entra Roles.
   • Hybrid models break role-based consistency.

5. Foreign Security Principals (FSPs)
   • Enable cross-domain access but introduce audit and management complexity.
   • Difficult to review, prone to misconfiguration, and increase risk.

Why This Matters: The Access Review Conundrum

In these environments, access reviews become one of the most painful governance activities:

• Manual processes are slow and error-prone.
• Native tools don’t handle nested groups or multi-domain visibility.
• Flattening and linking groups requires advanced coding (and endless debugging).
• Without transparency, access risk remains hidden until auditors or attackers expose it.

The Options Facing Organizations

• Manual Governance – Costly and slow, but “safe.”
• Ignoring the Problem – Easy in the short term, but risks failed audits, compliance fines, and security breaches.
• Unaware Exposure – Dangerous blind spots if organizations don’t realize what they’ve inherited.
• Investing in Purpose-Built Solutions – The only scalable way to align governance with business reality.

How Clarity Security Helps

Clarity takes a realistic approach: instead of forcing migrations or costly restructuring, it provides native support for hybrid multi-domain AD environments, including foreign security principals and nested groups. With Clarity, organizations can:

• Discover over-assigned privileges (e.g., excessive domain admin rights).
• Reduce months of manual data prep into automated workflows.
• Streamline and simplify the entire access review lifecycle.

The result - identity governance that fits complex AD environments instead of fighting against them.