Cayosoft helped a state achieve secure, scalable hybrid active directory management
Built for the moment hybrid identity becomes the bottleneck
A large U.S. state IT department simplified Active Directory and Microsoft 365 administration across 25+ AD domainsand 25,000+ users, eliminated legacy tool complexity, and removed hybrid adoption bottlenecks by replacing Quest with Cayosoft.
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Challenge
When legacy tools break at hybrid scale
The Department of Information Technology (DOIT) for a large U.S. state provides centralized IT services and global help desk support for more than 25 state agencies. After adopting a hybrid Exchange and Microsoft 365 architecture, the team quickly ran into hard limits with their legacy Active Directory management tools.
What should have been a modernization initiative became a source of friction:
Identity was mission-critical. The tools managing it were not.
Solution
Result:
Organization Profile:
State Department of Information Technology
Cayosoft was selected because it delivered complete hybrid administration in a single product, without scripts, bolt-ons, or parallel sync engines. Fragmented tooling was replaced by a unified, policy-driven approach that worked across Active Directory, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 from day one.
“The Quest product didn’t meet our hybrid needs and was going to require a complex configuration with extra scripts and sync tools. Cayosoft met our requirements with a single product that securely manages both our on-premises and hybrid Microsoft environments.”
— Senior DOIT Administrator, Large U.S. State
With Cayosoft Administrator, the state IT team:
This was not an overlay. It was a structural simplification of identity operations.
After replacing their legacy Quest solution with Cayosoft, the state achieved:
Identity operations became predictable, scalable, and resilient.
“Cayosoft gave us a single platform to manage Active Directory and Microsoft 365 securely and at scale. The replacement was straightforward and eliminated unnecessary complexity.”
— Director of Identity & Infrastructure, U.S. State Government
Hybrid Microsoft identity is no longer optional. It is the backbone of government operations, security, and service delivery.
Cayosoft is built for the moments that define IT organizations:
This state IT department did not just modernize tools. It modernized how identity work gets done.
Cayosoft delivers a unified platform to securely manage, continuously monitor, and instantly recover Microsoft identity systems, including on-prem Active Directory, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Intune, and more.
| Feature | Cayosoft | Legacy |
|---|---|---|
| Hybrid Microsoft Management | Built from the ground up | Bolt-on hybrid support |
| Automation | Declarative, script‑free | PowerShell-heavy |
| Security & Delegation | Zero Trust, vOUs | Complex AD permissions |
| Instant Recovery | Forest-wide recovery in minutes | Manual, batch recovery |
| Customer Support | Direct, transparent, fast | Known delays, upsells |
| Licensing | Transparent, all‑in‑one | Fragmented, audit‑prone |
See how Cayosoft simplifies identity operations at scale.
In most state governments, hybrid Active Directory refers to running traditional on-premises Active Directory alongside Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft 365. User authentication, access control, and policy enforcement span both environments, often supporting thousands of employees, contractors, and agencies with different security requirements.
State IT teams often manage:
As environments grow, manual processes, scripts, and disconnected tools stop scaling, increasing operational risk and slowing response times.
Common risks include:
Because identity underpins access to nearly all systems, these issues can quickly become business and mission risks.
Native tools are designed to manage individual platforms, not the full hybrid identity lifecycle. State IT teams often find that:
This creates operational friction and increases dependence on a small number of experts.
Scripts are powerful but fragile. In government environments, they often:
Over time, script-heavy environments become harder to secure, harder to audit, and harder to maintain.
Secure delegation allows help desk and regional IT teams to perform routine identity tasks without granting broad administrative rights. This reduces bottlenecks while maintaining least-privilege access—something especially important in regulated public-sector environments.
Auditors often ask:
When identity operations are manual or fragmented, answering these questions becomes time-consuming and risky.
Scalability means being able to:
Scalability is as much about operating model as it is about technology.
Automation reduces:
When identity workflows are automated and policy-driven, risk is addressed earlier, before it escalates into incidents or audit findings.
When identity systems fail or drift:
As a result, identity failures increasingly show up as service outages and mission disruption, not just security events.
It means being able to answer, in real time:
Without this visibility, problems are often discovered after impact occurs.
By standardizing identity operations through:
This allows knowledge to be embedded into the system rather than locked inside individuals’ heads.
Active Directory remains deeply embedded in government infrastructure. Most states modernize by:
Modernization focuses on control and resilience, not wholesale replacement.
The state focused on:
This shifted identity from a reactive burden to a predictable operational function.
Highly transferable. The challenges addressed—hybrid complexity, staffing constraints, audit pressure, and security risk—are common across state and local governments.
Key questions include:
These questions usually surface the true cost of the status quo.
The goal is confidence: