Quest Microsoft Platform Management Business Sees Strong Growth as Customers Seek SaaS Tools to Migrate, Manage and Secure Hybrid Environments

Quest Software, a global systems management and security software provider, today announced impressive growth within its Microsoft Platform Management business, seeing a 148% YoY growth for its Azure-hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Quest On Demand. Quest has been helping organizations migrate, manage and secure Microsoft platforms for over 20 years and the strong growth of the business’s On Demand SaaS offerings reinforces that organizations seek solutions beyond native tool offerings to manage and maintain control of their Microsoft hybrid environments. In fact, Microsoft recently recognized Quest as a finalist for the 2019 Microsoft Health Partner of the Year Award, demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

Fueling this growth is the business’s continued investment to delivering new capabilities within the On Demand SaaS portfolio. General availability of the new On Demand Group Management module gives IT teams easy control in managing hybrid Active Directory (AD) and Office 365 groups, including distribution lists and mail-enabled security groups. On Demand Group Management ensures that on-premises and cloud groups conform to standard naming conventions, have clear ownership, and a well-established purpose which significantly reduces security and compliance risk. The new On Demand Audit module tightens the security posture and empower teams to meet compliance requirements with real-time tracking, auditing and forensic analysis of on-prem and Office 365 workloads. The On Demand platform also offers On Demand Migration to safely move Azure AD user accounts, email and OneDrive data from one Office 365 tenant to another with coexistence, and On Demand Recovery for robust backup and recovery of Office 365 and Azure AD users, groups, attributes and group membership.

“We are steadfast in our commitment to supporting an organization’s investment in Microsoft and in helping them control their journey to the cloud,” said Michael Tweddle, President and GM, Microsoft Platform Management. “With Microsoft Azure and Office 365 fast becoming the cloud platforms of choice, our On Demand portfolio gives organizations all the tools they need to move faster, tighten security and stay in control of their Microsoft environment, all in a service delivery model.”

Complete SaaS offering for Microsoft Hybrid Management

Many organizations have adopted a hybrid approach to delivering business applications to end users, and Office 365 has fast become the productivity platform of choice as organizations begin their journey to the cloud. Microsoft reports that there are over 135 million monthly paid Office 365 commercial users and more than 90% of fortune 500 have at least one Microsoft cloud enterprise service. As cloud footprints expand, so too does the complexity of securing, managing and ensuring compliance for multiple workloads such as SharePoint Online and Teams as well as AD and Azure AD. To help, customers are going beyond native tool capabilities and leveraging SaaS offerings in order to normalize Microsoft on-prem and cloud infrastructure management.

Quest supports this hybrid business model and is leveraging decades of expertise in migrating, managing and securing on-prem Microsoft platforms and bringing these capabilities to the cloud with simple to use SaaS offerings. With new hybrid group management and auditing solutions, Quest now boasts one of the industry’s the most complete, SaaS management platform for addressing the most pressing Azure AD Office 365 management challenges.

Key features/benefits of On Demand Group Management include:

• Self-service UI that enables users to quickly create or request/remove access to group on premises or in the cloud. This frees up IT bandwidth and reduces and improves group management efficiency. Group owners can create, manage, and attest their groups through a simple self-service portal.
• Automated IT policy engine that enables admins to grant group access to users when, where and for how long they need it.
• Rule-based group creation policies that empower teams to establish rules for attestation, expiration and ongoing re-attestation to tighten security continuously as your environment grows.
• Strong resource management capabilities so users can manage access to built-in and custom resources connected to Azure AD. IT admins can see and request access to resources with friendly naming conventions which brings self-service to the next level.

Key features/benefits of On Demand Audit include:

• Hosted auditing dashboard to easily consolidate audit data from on-prem and Office 365 workloads to get a single, normalized view of all changes. Correlate identities across on premises and cloud, search by either and get all results regardless of where the activity originated. On Demand Audit seamlessly integrates with Quest Change Auditor, the company’s on-prem IT security and auditing offering, to give users a single, correlated view of all changes taking place across hybrid Microsoft environments.
• Responsive, flexible search that slashesinvestigation time with fast, intuitively built searches across tenants that delivers immediate results.
• Interactive data visualizations capabilities that empower IT teams to transform hundreds and millions of hybrid audit events into visual dashboards that help simplify compliance reporting and forensic investigation.
• Long-term storage that goes well beyond native retention period and allows teams to store audit history for up to 10 years and keep as much data as necessary to satisfy retention policies.

“For many organizations, Azure AD and Office 365 sit at the core of their cloud strategy, yet IT continues to struggle with basic management tasks such as group management, user and group backup and recovery, and management of log data,” said Brad Kirby, Senior Director, Product Management, Quest Microsoft Platform Management business. “Quest On Demand Group Management and On Demand Audit augment native tools to make it easy for organizations to mitigate security and compliance risks with powerful group management capabilities that are simple to implement and real-time tracking of all configuration, user and administrator changes made across hybrid environments.”