From Mishaps to Meltdowns: Safeguard Your Active Directory

Welcome back to our three-part series on Microsoft Active Directory (AD). If you missed our previous post on the importance of protecting AD, you can check it out here.

AD and Entra ID are central to providing secure authentication for your business, and enabling its recoverability is critical. If AD data becomes corrupted or the directory itself is unavailable, it can severely impact line-of-business applications and processes, blocking user access to vital systems and resources. Without AD, the business cannot continue. Given the stakes, it’s crucial to be ready for the various disasters that could impact AD.

AD Disasters Can Vary in Size, Scope  

AD disasters span a wide spectrum, whether accidental or malicious. They can be as minor as the accidental deletion of an individual object to the deletion of an entire organizational unit hierarchy. In worst-case scenarios like schema corruption or ransomware, the entire domain or forest may need to be recovered.

These scenarios emphasize the need for robust recovery strategies. In this post, we’ll tackle recovery from smaller disasters like accidental deletions. Stay tuned for Part 3 of our series to learn about forest recovery.

Navigating Granular Disasters

Behind all the technology keeping our systems running, there are humans. With multiple administrators typically having permissions to AD and the scripts and automation they use to keep the data in AD up to date, mistakes will happen.

Let’s say you’re deleting a user who has left your company – a pretty routine task. But let’s say you delete the wrong user. Now, that user’s productivity is derailed, and there’s time and cost associated with the remedy. Your business is disrupted, and you might suffer reputational damage if they happened to be in the middle of a critical, time-sensitive project.

And that user you intended to delete? A disgruntled ex-colleague with access to your systems can do untold damage to your company and your brand. It’s the perfect illustration of why fast, accurate operations are critical to protecting your AD – even for the most basic of tasks.

How Commvault Safeguards Your AD

Commvault® Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory helps protect your AD and Entra ID to minimize loss, downtime, and cyber risk. It provides daily backups of attributes and objects – and fast, granular, and accurate recovery of missing, damaged, or misconfigured objects. Interactive full domain comparisons allow you to easily compare all changes in the AD domain between two points in time, quickly identify the data that needs to be recovered or reverted, and restore it quickly, directly from the report. All of it is designed to enable faster recovery and continuous business.

Single Domain Controller AD Recovery in Cleanroom Recovery

Users now can include a single domain controller in the Cleanroom Recovery group to streamline the recovery process and integrate AD seamlessly. With this new capability, users can recover AD alongside other workloads into a Cleanroom target to quickly restore directory services.

Learn More

For more insights, check out our recent podcast episodes. On The Resiliency Rundown podcast, Commvault Field CTO and Principal Technologist Dan Conrad and host Thomas Bryant discuss navigating AD threats and protections. And on The STRIVE podcast, host Darren Thomson talks about best practices to protect your AD.

Experience the power of Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory with a 30-day free trial.