NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Modern enterprises operate in fragmented environments and identity has become the central point of control. Because identity now governs access across the entire organization, it has also become the primary target for attackers. In response, AD360 adopts a risk-based approach to IAM delivered through a converged platform that unifies governance, access management, security, and recovery.

At the intelligence layer, Zia, ManageEngine’s in-house AI, delivers identity insights such as peer comparison analysis, high-risk group membership detection, and access pattern recognition. These capabilities enable administrators to identify privilege outliers, toxic access combinations, and abnormal behavior patterns that increase exposure. Instead of relying solely on periodic reviews, organizations gain contextual visibility into emerging identity risks and excessive privilege accumulation.

Complementing these AI insights is AD360’s centralized governance dashboard. This dashboard provides a unified view of access certification campaigns, identity risk assessment, and risk exposure management. The risk exposure management capability maps object relationships, privilege chains, and potential lateral movement paths across the Active Directory environment. This visualization allows security teams to move beyond theoretical compliance and assess identity risk from an attacker’s perspective.

Identity risk assessment continuously evaluates users based on privilege levels, access patterns, and behavioral anomalies, assigning contextual risk scores that inform governance decisions. Sensitive access detection and role-based risk analysis highlight high-risk concentrations across departments and organizational units. ML-based access recommendations support right-sizing of privileges, while access certification campaigns, automated scheduling, bulk review actions, reviewer collaboration workflows, and comprehensive audit trails operationalize governance at scale, ensuring that risk insights translate into measurable control. Risk detection is strengthened through the Attack Surface Analyzer, which surfaces over 25 common attack techniques and highlights privilege escalation risks, insecure delegations, and system misconfigurations across domain controllers, servers, and endpoints.

Its user behavior analytics capabilities provide deep visibility into how identities interact by analyzing login patterns and remote desktop activity and failed authentication attempts to establish behavioral baselines. More than 250 integrations across HRMS, HCM, ITSM, and enterprise applications extend identity governance beyond directory boundaries, preventing identity silos across the broader ecosystem.

The impact is reflected in real-world deployments:

– INSPIRE Entertainment Resort enhanced internal threat detection and compliance by improving visibility into abnormal activity and risky configurations while reducing operational effort.

– Innodata, where nearly 80 percent of employees work remotely, reduced IT intervention for password resets to almost zero, significantly lowering operational overhead while strengthening authentication security.