Legacy Active Directory Secured in 8 Weeks | Heavy Equipment Manufacturer Case Study
Industry
Insurance
Customer
Mid-market U.S. Insurance Carrier
A global heavy-equipment manufacturer serving both the surface and underground mining sectors operates dozens of assembly plants and service depots across five continents.
More than 15,000 engineers, mechanics, and field-support staff depend on the firm’s IT backbone to coordinate design changes, parts logistics, and predictive maintenance data.
The company's operations need to comply with reliability and safety regulations (MSHA, ISO 45001). These regulations and standards drive strict uptime and cybersecurity expectations.
Recent industry reports showing a 200% surge in Active Directory-based attacks on mining suppliers prompted executives to demand a rapid security overhaul.
Key Highlights
Situation
Our customer was legally required to satisfy mining safety mandates, regional data protection laws, and emerging operational regulations.
The firm’s identity management system needed an upgrade. Over a dozen Active Directory (AD) forests, some more than 20 years old, contained thousands of user accounts. This puts important customer operations and data at risk.
A single breach could trigger costly operational stops and fines.
Additionally, the client sought the operational benefit of deploying an automated detection platform to effectively monitor its domain footprint.
Problem
One major challenge was visibility. With no modern monitoring tools in place, the small security team needed a robust solution to monitor Active Directory for exploited accounts, hacking attempts, and other signals of compromise. Multiple forests, inconsistent Group Policies, and stale administrative accounts created fertile ground for reconnaissance, credential theft, and lateral movement.
In short, legacy Active Directory forests can put production uptime at risk if not properly managed.
Solution
X-Centric weighed three options as possible solutions: extending the existing SIEM, rebuilding AD, or overlaying Microsoft Defender for Identity. The team chose the third option because of speed and native alignment with the customer's Microsoft 365 E5 licenses.
Deployment highlights (eight-week program).
Sensors deployed on all domain controllers (Weeks 1-4).
Integration with Microsoft Entra ID for hybrid visibility (Weeks 3-5).
Alert tuning, machine-learning baselines, and automated ticket routing (Weeks 5-7).
Analyst training and playbook hand-off (Weeks 7-8).
Defender for Identity now surfaces reconnaissance, compromised-credential use, and lateral-movement attempts in near real-time, automatically correlating data with Microsoft Defender XDR.
Microsoft Defender for Identity keeps a constant watch on the customer's on-prem Active Directory. Sensors on each domain controller, AD FS, and AD CS stream network traffic, and Windows event logs to the cloud.
Behavioral analytics constantly measure current activity against a learned "normal" baseline, and the moment any phase of an attack—such as reconnaissance, credential theft, or lateral movement—deviates from that pattern, the system alerts the security team in real-time.
Operational Impact
Metric (first 6 months) | Before | After | Benefit |
Mean time-to-detect identity attack | 48 h | 28 min | -96 % (from two days to under half an hour)
|
Unplanned AD-related downtime | 2 h/QTR | 0 h |
US $150 k production loss avoided |
Incidents auto-resolved by ML-driven playbooks | 0/mo. | 35/mo. |
Freed ≈ 0.6 FTE analyst capacity |
Security-posture score (Microsoft Secure Score) | 43 % | 79 % |
+36 points
|
Analysts receive contextual, ranked alerts instead of raw log floods; shift hand-offs now start with “zero active ID threats” dashboards; and IT-OT coordination drills cut containment time below one hour.
The solution promised immediate cost avoidance, allowing the existing six-person team to triage threats without hiring additional analysts
Business Outcomes
Risk-mitigation at scale: Identity-borne threats now surface long before production is impacted, safeguarding the operational reputation of this multi-billion-dollar firm.
Head-count-neutral efficiency: Automation boosted analyst productivity by 60%, postponing the need to hire additional Tier-1 responders.
Foundation for Zero-Trust: After the deployment of Defender for Identity and Entra ID, the firm can fast-track MFA rollouts, conditional access, and future OT/IoT onboarding.
