Privileged Control Plane Security Assessment
Assess privileged identities, administrative paths and the systems that control enterprise trust and security.
Enterprise environments contain a small number of systems and identities capable of changing trust, security policy or administrative control across large parts of the organization.
These control-plane assets may span Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, hybrid identity infrastructure, PKI, Microsoft 365 and cloud platforms.
This assessment identifies those assets and examines how privileged access actually reaches them.
What we assess
Privileged identities
- Domain administrators
- Enterprise administrators
- Microsoft Entra privileged roles
- Azure privileged roles
- Microsoft 365 administrative roles
- Service identities with control-plane access
- Emergency accounts
Administrative paths
- Direct administration
- Delegated administration
- Group-based privilege
- Nested privilege
- Remote administration
- Management servers
- Administrative tooling
Control-plane systems
- Domain controllers
- Hybrid identity servers
- Certificate authorities
- Privileged management systems
- Azure platform administration
- Microsoft 365 administration
- Security-management systems
Authentication
- MFA
- Authentication strength
- Legacy authentication
- Privileged credential exposure
- Administrative credential reuse
- Passwordless authentication
- Privileged workstation usage
Privilege lifecycle
- Standing privilege
- Just-in-time access
- PIM
- Role assignment
- Access review
- Administrative separation
- Privilege removal
What you receive
- Privileged identity inventory
- Control-plane asset map
- Administrative-path analysis
- Privileged access findings
- Risk prioritization
- Segmentation recommendations
- Remediation roadmap
- Validation after remediation
Example public finding
This is an illustrative example, not a finding from a customer assessment.
PCS-012 — Privileged credentials can traverse normal productivity systems
Observation
Accounts capable of administering identity control-plane systems are also used on general-purpose endpoints or productivity systems.
Why it matters
A compromise originating from a lower-trust workstation can potentially expose credentials capable of affecting significantly higher-trust systems.
The security of the control plane therefore becomes dependent on the security of ordinary endpoints.
Recommended direction
Separate privileged and productivity identities, restrict where privileged accounts can authenticate, introduce appropriate privileged workstations or hardened administrative paths, and reduce standing privilege.
Public methodology
Public material may include:
- Control-plane definition
- Privileged-access domains
- High-level trust model
- Example administrative-path diagrams
- Sanitized findings
- Selected assessment checks
- Sample report
Environment-specific assessment details and remediation guidance are provided within the agreed project scope.