Advanced Group Policy Management end of life
Advanced Group Policy Management end of life
Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) EOL is rapidly approaching in 2026.
Don’t be left hanging without a secure and effective way to manage your critical Group Policy. Move to GPOADmin.
Manage Group Policy more efficiently than ever before.
The clock is ticking on AGPM.
While AGPM has long been a useful tool for Group Policy management, it’s going away soon. Advanced Group Policy Management is part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, which has reached end of life; mainstream support ended in 2018 and extended support will end in 2026.
AGPM has significant limitations.
Advanced Group Policy Management suffers from some important drawbacks. In particular, its centralized administration model requires either granting excessive permissions to select administrators or passing instructions through multiple teams. This model increases the risks of security issues and potentially devastating human errors, and it is not scalable to meet the needs of modern organizations.
Don’t let your GPOs become a target.
Given the pending AGPM EOL, you need a replacement ASAP to protect your GPOs from SwiftSlicer, BlackCat, Mango Sandstorm, Play and many other modern ransomware gangs who routinely abuse Group Policy as part of their attack playbooks. With over 4,000 GPO settings in Active Directory, you can’t afford go back to managing this enormous attack surface alone.
Don’t delay.
Proper Group Policy management is more urgent than ever. Threat actors are now regularly abusing GPOs during their attacks to accomplish key tasks such as:
- Moving laterally from one device or system to others
- Escalating their access rights
- Avoiding detection by impairing antivirus tools and other security controls
- Registering scheduled tasks to deploy ransomware or other malware
In fact, these tactics are so rampant that threat intelligence firm Mandiant devotes an entire step of its five-phase threat playbook to abuse of Group Policy.
By replacing the EOLed AGPM with GPOADmin, you can dramatically reduce your risk.
Switch to GPOADmin today — mitigate ransomware risk.
GPOADmin delivers the powerful Group Policy management capabilities that organizations need to mitigate today’s sophisticated threats and ensure strong productivity.
Clean up and consolidate.
Want a clean Group Policy that is free of hidden vulnerabilities and easier to administer? GPOADmin overcomes the limited visibility provided by AGPM and native logs, empowering you to understand exactly which GPOs and settings you actually need and merge redundant or conflicting settings.
Streamline administration workflows.
GPOADmin provides approval workflows for changing or creating GPOs, version control, and check-in and check-out processes for GPO editing — thwarting adversaries who try to manipulate Group Policy during attacks. It further slashes risk by eliminating the need to have highly privileged administrators who are tasked with managing all GPOs.
Protect critical settings.
GPOADmin empowers you to lock down critical GPO settings so that they cannot be changed at all, whether accidentally by administrators or maliciously by adversaries like ransomware gangs.
Speed threat detection and response.
The GPOADmin Watcher Service promptly notifies the security team about any unexpected and potentially dangerous modifications to Group Policy. In one click, they can revert an undesired setting change and jump back to a functional version of the GPO, instantly blocking an attack.
Overcome the global shortage of cybersecurity pros skilled in Active Directory.
Group Policy is so powerful and complex that even one erroneous change can seriously impair security, productivity or compliance — but the number of IT pros fluent with AD in general and Group Policy in particular is plummeting. GPOADmin provides an intuitive interface for effective management. Plus, you can granularly delegate responsibility for managing specific policies and thoroughly test changes before rolling them out to the production environment.
Resources
Ransomware protection: the vital role of Active Directory Group Policy
Learn how ransomware gangs abuse GPOs and how to improve ransomware protection with effective GPO management.
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