Transparency for Better Protection – Release 2026 R1 Brings Clarity to Many Areas
Release 2026 R1 introduces numerous enhancements to the baramundi Management Suite, providing IT administrators with even better access to relevant information.
At a glance
- Guardian Mode inventories and cleans up local admin accounts
- Asset Management enables user-specific assignment
- New bConnect Controller improves integration with third-party systems
- Preview: Co-management with MS Intune now also covers Conditional Access
- Preview: New reporting simplifies security assessments and compliance verification
Guardian Mode – No More Loose Ends
It’s painful, but sometimes simply unavoidable: An IT problem can only be solved on-site by manually working on the computer. However, the local administrator account required for this can easily become a trap for the company’s IT security. A compromised password, a specific vulnerability, or an incomplete decommissioning – and suddenly, unwanted actors have access to sensitive infrastructure. There’s only one solution: consistently clean up accounts that aren’t currently in use. The new Guardian Mode for the baramundi Management Suite makes it very easy for IT admins to keep things in order: The feature first inventories which admin accounts exist and what permissions are associated with them. Based on this information, various options are then available: In addition to deletion—including an entire group of accounts if necessary – accounts can also be simply deactivated or have their permissions specifically restricted. You can also define whether the change takes effect on the next reboot or after two hours at the latest. When applied consistently, this leaves no loose ends for potential attackers.
Assets for Users and Groups
"Possession is nine-tenths of the law," as the saying goes among lawyers. With the new release, baramundi Asset Management will now also take actual ownership into account: In addition to endpoints and logical groups, assets can now also be assigned to individual users, AD groups, or specific departments. This allows for a much clearer representation of actual ownership relationships—such as who was issued which YubiKey, or who has the press department’s camera. Furthermore, the entire interface has been redesigned to provide a more consistent structure, and all areas of asset management now benefit from improved filtering and export options. This allows for a more flexible representation of the asset structure, making it much easier to understand and navigate in complex environments.
baramundi Connect 2.0 – New Controllers
However, our efforts to increase transparency are not limited to the Management Suite itself: We have expanded the baramundi Connect interface so that we can now communicate with a whole range of new controllers, offering entirely new automation possibilities:
- Third-party systems can now access the results of the vulnerability scanner, which should significantly simplify documentation and, consequently, audit processes.
- The contents of the dynamic group filters, including all metadata and endpoint information, can be forwarded directly to external monitoring and reporting systems, which massively increases both the depth and breadth of the analyses.
- Those using our Defense Control can now significantly simplify the work of service desk staff by making decrypted BitLocker data directly accessible in ITSM, allowing users to resume working on their machines more quickly in an emergency.
- In addition, it is now possible to automate cleanup processes in the DIP of Managed Software, eliminating the need for a manual start in the Management Center.
Preview: Co-Management – Conditional Access
There have also been significant developments in this release regarding co-management and Intune integration: The compliance status of iOS and Android endpoints can now be forwarded directly from the baramundi Management Server to Entra ID via Intune and integrated into the Conditional Access policies there. This allows companies to ensure that only devices with a valid compliance status reported by baramundi are granted access to corporate resources. This enhances security without requiring companies to adjust their existing management processes. Since this feature is still being refined, it will initially be available only as a preview version at the release’s launch.
Preview: New Reporting
Decisions—whether short-term or far-reaching – should ideally be well-founded and not based solely on gut instinct: both day-to-day IT operations and management decisions, security assessments, and compliance reporting benefit from reliable reporting. With the new baramundi version, there is now a centralized, historical, and management-ready database that enables the creation of reports independently of the baramundi Management Center. This allows developments, trends, and the status of IT and security measures to be evaluated transparently, comprehensibly, and over the long term – including via existing BI tools such as Microsoft Power BI. The new reporting feature is available as a preview version both on-premises and in the cloud.
