Quest Identity Defense brings new Agentic AI Defense to further enhance threat containment capabilities.
Identity has become the primary attack surface for modern enterprises, yet most security solutions and identity threat detection and response (ITDR) strategies still aren’t built to defend it. An alert fires, a suspicious account touches Active Directory or Entra ID, and the doomsday clock starts ticking. Attackers with a foothold in identity infrastructure can escalate privilege and move laterally within minutes, while security teams are often still piecing together what happened.
This isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a structural gap:
- Visibility is fragmented. Traditional detection and EDR tools weren’t built to see deep, security-grade activity inside Active Directory and Entra ID, so risky configurations and Tier 0 exposures go unnoticed until they’re exploited.
- AI is outpacing controls. It’s accelerating attacker tradecraft and multiplying non-human identities and privilege sprawl faster than security teams can respond.
- Alert volume outpaces analyst capacity. Teams can be buried in a myriad of identity alerts without context, slowing investigation exactly when speed matters most.
- AD expertise is disappearing. Institutional knowledge gaps leave teams without the depth they need most, right when they need it.
The cost shows up in $730K per hour in outages, identity-driven breaches and ransomware, audit findings and regulatory exposure, and security teams that are monitoring identity but structurally unable to contain an attack before it spreads. Worst case, it’s a cyberattack headline no organization wants to make.
Automatic threat containment with Agentic AI Defense and Shields Up
Quest Identity Defense, part of the Quest Security Management Platform, is an agentic AI-powered ITDR solution that delivers continuous visibility and real-time protection across Active Directory and Entra ID. It identifies Tier 0 assets and non-human identities, prevents unauthorized changes, and contains attacks before they spread with the Shields Up capability. Deep auditing, AI-driven insights, and remediation guidance help up-skill security teams to investigate faster and improve threat response.
And now, the new Agentic AI Defense capability further enhances Identity Defense’s threat response by closing the gap between detection and containment.
Here’s what these capabilities look like together:
1. Prevent. Identity Defense continuously assesses the security posture of Tier 0 assets, human identities, and non-human identities, surfacing misconfigurations, privilege exposures, and other weaknesses before attackers can exploit them, along with AI-led insights and remediation guidance on how to fix them. Identity Defense’s object protection capability closes the loop, freezing crown-jewel identity objects and privileged paths so they can’t be changed in the first place.
2. Detect with context. If any anomalous activity takes place, Identity Defense’s continuous monitoring and deep AD auditing captures the who, what, when, where, and from which workstation behind every significant change, giving security teams clear investigation context instead of raw alerts.
3. Respond autonomously. The moment risk emerges, Agentic AI Defense evaluates it in real time, then flags and isolates the threat, dramatically slashing the time between an identity compromise and a response kicking in. Instead of waiting on an analyst to catch the signal and decide what to do, the agent does that evaluation and immediately prompts Shields Up to activate.
4. Lock down. The Shields Up capability stops attacker persistence and lateral movement, including DCShadow-style attacks, before any damage has a chance to spread. The identity is contained, not extinguished: legitimate access continues, while the attacker’s ability to change anything does not.
Together, these layers show what Quest does beyond detection. It prevents, contains, and locks down identity risk automatically, faster than a human team could act alone.
Why it matters
- No slow threat response. Identity compromises that once took hours to contain can now be flagged and stopped as they happen, as part of Quest’s demonstrated 44% improvement in identity MTTR.
- No collateral damage. Freezing an identity’s ability to act, rather than disabling accounts or isolating endpoints, avoids the disruption that often makes containment as costly as the attack itself.
- Less reliance on scarce AD expertise. Plain-language risk and recommended actions give security teams the confidence of a seasoned Active Directory expert, even without one on staff.
- A smaller blast radius. Acting at the identity control plane layer the moment a risk emerges narrows the window that attackers have to escalate privilege or move laterally.
- A stronger compliance story. Aligned to NIST CSF 2.0 and Gartner’s ITDR framework, it helps prove real risk reduction to boards and auditors, not just activity logs.
The bottom line
Identity attacks don’t wait, and with Quest, neither does security. Quest Identity Defense delivers continuous visibility, monitoring, protection, detection, and now, with Agentic AI Defense and Shields Up capabilities, automatic response and containment across the entire identity attack lifecycle.
Learn more about Quest Identity Defense.
