Automated Forest Recovery for AD Now Available

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is the cornerstone of most enterprise IT networks, providing essential authentication and authorization for business-critical applications and resources. Its central role also makes it a primary target for attackers aiming to compromise enterprises or, in some cases, bring down the entire network. When AD goes offline, business comes to a standstill. Are you prepared for the worst-case scenario?

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition, offering full, automated forest recovery for AD that enables rapid restoration of the AD forest to help maintain continuous business.

AD Recovery is Foundational to Continuous Business

AD is the center of secure authentication and services, and its recoverability is critical when faced with outages or ransomware. Applications, file systems, email services, and databases all rely on AD for proper authentication and secure user access control, so when AD is damaged or taken completely offline, the critical applications and services it supports become inaccessible.

Consider the impact: Bank staff can’t access customer accounts. Doctors and nurses can’t access medical records. Coders and developers can’t publish code. Teams can’t collaborate or chat to get work done.

Without AD, the business cannot continue. Cybercriminals know this, which is why they make AD a primary target in 9 out of 10 cyberattacks. When disaster strikes, recovering AD is vital, yet traditionally has been very hard to do, requiring intricate, time-consuming, manual processes.

With ransomware increasingly targeting critical identity infrastructure, having a well-documented and frequently tested recovery plan to restore and rebuild your entire AD environment to a pre-attack state is essential.  

The Complexities of AD Forest Recovery

Microsoft provides prescriptive guidance on rebuilding an entire AD forest after a catastrophic disaster in its Active Directory Forest Recovery Guide. Due to the complex nature of AD, the elements involved in a full forest recovery are rigid, prescriptive, time-consuming, and highly susceptible to human error. Depending on the complexity of your AD architecture, the process can involve 50 to 100 or even more tasks.

Due to the distributed nature and multi-master architecture of AD, restoring it demands meticulous coordination. It’s not possible to simply restore domain controllers from backup and call it a day. There are dozens of intricate hygiene steps that need to be performed on the recovered domain controllers and within AD itself at very specific points throughout the forest recovery. If these steps are not followed correctly, you risk introducing new corruption or inconsistencies in the recovered environment, which can be very difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.

Relying on a manual disaster or cyber recovery plan and out-of-the-box tools could mean it takes days to restore an entire AD forest. In the face of disaster, time is of the essence, and the longer it takes to restore AD components back to a working state, the greater the disruption to the business.

Automate and Accelerate AD recovery with Commvault Cloud

Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for AD Enterprise Edition brings a new level of resilience to AD by enabling automated, rapid recovery of the Active Directory forest to a pre-attack state. This automation eliminates slow and error-prone manual processes, reducing the risk of errors and accelerating recovery times. Here’s how it works:

• Make AD recovery a snap via automated runbooks: Automated forest recovery runbooks orchestrate the multi-step process required for AD forest recovery, including the critical AD hygiene tasks required to verify consistency in the recovered directory, such as seizing FSMO roles and adjusting the RID pool. These runbooks also can be used for regular testing in non-production environments to enhance cyber readiness.
• Enable fast recovery of the most important AD infrastructure: Visual topology views of your AD environment enable simple and rapid identification of which domain controllers to restore first and how they should be recovered to accelerate the availability of AD services.
• Track recovery progress with step-by-step runbook views: Prescriptive runbook views of the recovery process provide total transparency and fine-grained control, allowing you to easily tailor the workflow to your environment. During recovery, you have total visibility into where you are in the process and how long until your AD is back online.

• Accelerate recovery times and advance resilience: Manually recovering an AD forest can take days or even weeks to complete, but with Commvault, you can recover it in a fraction of the time. Commvault Cloud integrates AD forest recovery with granular recovery of both AD and Entra ID, providing comprehensive protection. 

Take your AD protection to the next level

Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for AD Enterprise Edition is now available, providing protection, recovery, and cyber resilience for your AD environment. Visit the AD solution page to learn more or experience the solution firsthand through our interactive walk-through demo . See for yourself how Commvault can elevate your AD protection strategy.