Secure the most powerfulaccounts in your organization.
Link3IT performs independent identity security reviews that uncover hidden privilege-escalation paths, PAM weaknesses, identity sprawl, and administrative exposure — before attackers do.
Platforms & frameworks we work across
Everything that touches privileged access.
One specialist across the entire identity estate — so the seams between platforms become controls, not gaps.
Privileged Access Management
CyberArk — now Idira, part of Palo Alto Networks — vault, CPM rotation, PSM session isolation, and least-privilege safe design: deployed, hardened, and verified. The credentials that can end your business, brought fully under control.
Cloud Identity
Entra ID hardening — Conditional Access, PIM, MFA coverage, legacy-auth lockdown.
Active Directory
Attack-path review — privileged groups, delegation, Kerberoast exposure, tiering.
Identity Governance & Lifecycle
Joiner-mover-leaver automation with verified deprovisioning, access certification, and audit-ready evidence — so access stays clean and provable over time.
Zero Trust Strategy
Board-ready, identity-centered roadmap — sequenced so it won't break operations.
Every place privilege hides — reviewed.
Identity risk doesn't live in one system. A Link3IT review spans the full estate, from the privileged vault to the machine identities most programs never inventory.
Privileged Access
- ▸Standing admins
- ▸Shared accounts
- ▸Password rotation
- ▸Safe permissions
- ▸Session isolation
Cloud Identity
- ▸Conditional Access
- ▸PIM eligibility
- ▸Guest access
- ▸Legacy authentication
- ▸MFA coverage
Governance
- ▸Joiners / movers / leavers
- ▸Access reviews
- ▸Service accounts
- ▸Secrets & key rotation
- ▸Orphaned accounts
Machine & Workload
- ▸Machine identities
- ▸Non-human accounts
- ▸Automation credentials
- ▸API & token sprawl
- ▸Workload trust
The perimeter moved. Most defenses didn't.
Identity is where modern attacks land and escalate — yet most organizations still secure it with fragmented tools and manual process. Here's why that keeps failing.
Tool sprawl
Each platform solves a slice of identity. Stitched together without a control strategy, the seams between them become the gaps attackers exploit.
Misconfiguration
Powerful platforms ship with permissive defaults. Conditional Access gaps, unrotated credentials, and over-scoped roles quietly accumulate risk.
Privilege drift
Access is granted faster than it's removed. Standing privilege builds up over years until one compromised account owns the environment.
Privileged access, observed and under control.
When identity is done right, every privileged action is brokered, rotated, recorded, and attributable. No standing credentials waiting to be stolen. No session anyone can't reconstruct. This is the operational posture a Link3IT engagement moves you toward.
- Credentials vaulted and auto-rotated
- Sessions isolated and recorded
- Just-in-time elevation, dual-controlled
- Every event audit-ready and attributable
See exactly where the chain breaks.
Click through how a real intrusion escalates — and the specific control that stops it at each stage.
How a breach actually moves
click a stage →Most breaches don't break in — they log in, then escalate. Here's the chain, and where the right control breaks it.
Phished credentials or a vulnerable edge service give an attacker a first, low-privilege account.
MFA + Conditional Access reduce the odds a stolen password alone gets in.
How breaches actually happen.
Identity intrusions follow a chain. Each link is a control that can break it — and each is something a Link3IT review finds and closes.
- PhishingA user surrenders credentials to a convincing lure.
- Token theftSession tokens are stolen, sidestepping the password entirely.
- MFA bypassLegacy auth or a gap in Conditional Access slips past MFA.
- Privilege escalationAn over-permissive group or service account opens the climb.
- Standing Global AdminPersistent elevated access becomes the attacker's foothold.
- Domain compromiseTier-0 control — the whole environment is theirs.
- Link3IT cuts the chain early.Every engagement maps these paths in your environment and closes the rungs — MFA gaps, standing privilege, escalation routes — before an adversary can climb them.
The hard cases are the point.
Link3IT is built for the environments where identity is genuinely complicated — hybrid, regulated, multi-forest, and privileged-access-heavy. The harder the estate, the more a disciplined review returns.
Hybrid Active Directory
On-prem AD synchronized with cloud identity — where the seams create the risk.
Multi-forest environments
Trust relationships and cross-forest privilege that few teams fully map.
Cloud-first organizations
Entra-centered estates where Conditional Access and PIM are the perimeter.
Regulated enterprises
Audit-intensive settings where evidence and control mapping are mandatory.
CyberArk / Idira PAM
Mature privileged-access deployments that need an independent health read.
Financial services
High-stakes environments where privileged compromise is an existential risk.
A CyberArk Health Check, start to finish.
An anonymized walkthrough of a typical engagement — the situation, what surfaced, and the outcome. Details are redacted and illustrative; the shape is real.
- Situation
A mid-market financial-services firm had run CyberArk for three years. It passed its original go-live review, but no one had assessed it since. Leadership wanted assurance before an upcoming audit.
- What we found
Of 31 findings, 3 were critical: 14 accounts vaulted but silently not rotating, a tier-0 safe reachable by 23 identities, and a class of sessions bypassing recording entirely. The platform looked healthy on the dashboard — the risk was underneath it.
- What we did
A phased remediation: restore reconciliation and force rotation, re-baseline safe membership to a named set, route bypassed targets through PSM, and add alerting so drift surfaces immediately next time.
- Outcome
Both critical rotation findings closed in the first 30-day phase using configuration change alone — no downtime. The firm walked into its audit with evidence, a roadmap, and a posture it could defend.
“The report told us exactly what to fix first — and why. We closed the critical items before the auditors arrived.”
— Representative client outcome
A named principal — not a faceless queue.
When you hand someone the keys to your privileged access, you should know exactly who holds them. With Link3IT, you work directly with the person doing the work.
Link3IT is led by Andrew Symister, an identity engineer who works in privileged-access operations inside a regulated, audit-intensive enterprise environment. That day-to-day operational reality — not slideware — is what shapes every engagement.
The approach is hands-on and control-focused: built and proven in a full hybrid-identity lab, grounded in how CyberArk, Entra ID, and Active Directory actually behave in production. When you engage Link3IT, there's no account team and no junior bench — you work with the engineer doing the work, start to finish.
Engagements map to the frameworks your auditors use.
Findings and evidence are aligned to recognized control frameworks — so the work supports your compliance posture and survives a vendor-risk review, whether you're chasing your first enterprise contract or defending an existing one.
Alignment means engagements are measured against and mapped to these frameworks. NDAs are routine, and access is scoped and read-only by default.
Structured engagements, scoped to outcomes.
Each engagement defines the problem, the approach, and the outcome before work begins — so you know exactly what you're buying and what you'll have at the end.
Enterprise-grade — at any size.
Identity risk doesn't wait until you're big. Whether you're a five-person startup or a regulated enterprise, there's a right-sized way to bring privileged access under control — scoped to where you actually are.
Get it right from the start.
Build identity on solid ground before scale makes it expensive to fix. A focused first review keeps you investor- and customer-ready.
Punch above your size.
Get enterprise-grade privileged-access discipline without an enterprise budget — or a full-time hire. Fixed-scope, high-leverage.
Independent assurance.
An outside, framework-aligned read on a mature program — the kind that survives audit and vendor-risk scrutiny.
Not sure where you fit? Start a conversation — the first call sizes the right starting point for your stage.
An entry point for every stage.
Whether you're a growing team getting identity under control for the first time or an enterprise hardening a mature program, there's a right-sized way to start. Every engagement is fixed-scope and agreed before any work begins — no surprises.
Starter Health Check
One environment, one clear verdict.
- One focus area (CyberArk, Entra ID, or AD)
- Prioritized findings report
- Risk-ranked remediation roadmap
- Executive summary
- One readout call
Professional Assessment
The full picture across your identity estate.
- Multiple domains assessed together
- Cross-domain maturity baseline
- Attack-path analysis
- Phased remediation roadmap
- Remediation support options
- Evidence pack for audit
Enterprise Program
Ongoing partnership, board-ready outcomes.
- Full-estate identity security program
- Zero Trust architecture & roadmap
- PAM deployment / migration support
- Retained advisory & escalations
- Audit & compliance alignment
- Quarterly posture reviews
Not sure which fits? Tell us your situation — the first call points you to the right starting point, even if it isn't with us.
A repeatable framework — not improvisation.
Generic consultants improvise each engagement. Every Link3IT review runs the same disciplined five-phase method, built on published frameworks and validated in a controlled lab — so the rigor is consistent whether you're the first client of the month or the tenth.
Walk through the method- 01Establish the baseline
- 02Evidence collection
- 03Analysis against attack paths
- 04Prioritized remediation
- 05Executive translation
What we actually find — and what to do about it.
Reduce identity risk — start with a conversation.
A focused discussion of your privileged access and identity priorities, and where Link3IT can reduce risk fastest. No pitch, no obligation.