Hybrid Identity Protection: Bridging On-Premises AD and Entra ID Security

Today, the vast majority of organizations operate in hybrid identity environments, where Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and Entra ID work together to manage user identities and secure access across different environments.

AD, the industry standard for on-premises identity management for over 25 years, supports countless integrated applications and serves as the authoritative source of identities and resources. To meet the growing demand for cloud access and external collaboration, many organizations have extended identity management to Entra ID, which provides secure access to cloud applications like Microsoft 365.

In most cases, AD remains the authoritative source for employee identities, with accounts and attributes synchronized one-way to Entra ID. This hybrid approach allows organizations to leverage AD’s robust, established capabilities while enjoying the flexibility of cloud-based identity management. However, this flexibility introduces complexity and new risks.

Why Hybrid Identity Protection Matters

9 Out of 10 Attacks Target Your Identity Infrastructure

From workstation logins to physical building access, AD and Entra ID are essential for the operation of an organization, making them highly attractive targets for cybercriminals. Because identity data flows between AD and Entra ID, any disruption in one system can quickly affect the other.

When authentication is unavailable due to a failure in AD or Entra ID, users are locked out of critical systems and applications. Productivity grinds to a halt, access to cloud and on-premises resources is disrupted, and even incident response efforts can be paralyzed.

Without authentication, the entire organization is effectively frozen. This underscores the need for rapid, reliable recovery of identity services to restore access and resume operations.

You’re Responsible for Entra ID Protection

Microsoft’s shared responsibility model makes it clear: Microsoft is responsible for the uptime of the platform. You protect your identities, configurations, and data.

This includes:

• User objects and group memberships.
• Conditional Access and MFA policies.
• Enterprise application configurations.
• Role-based access controls.

While Entra ID offers some native tools for object recovery via the recycle bin, its functionality is limited and only useful in specific scenarios. This leaves organizations with significant gaps in their protection strategy, making a third-party solution for protection essential.

Why Separate Protection Isn’t Enough

Fragmented Tools = Fragmented Security

Organizations often rely on separate tools for protecting AD and Entra ID, if at all. This creates:

• Visibility gaps across hybrid environments.
• Inconsistent recovery strategies and slower response times.
• Gaps that attackers can exploit.

A unified backup and recovery solution recognizes the interdependency between AD and Entra ID and treats hybrid identity as a single, cohesive system that needs comprehensive protection.

Unified Protection = Stronger Identity Resilience

Protecting both AD and Entra ID with a single, unified solution can enhance your security posture, simplify management, and enable faster recovery when it matters most. Here’s what a unified approach delivers:

• Consistent backup and recovery: Enable uniform protection and recovery across both AD and Entra ID environments.
• Granular restore capabilities: Recover specific user, group, policy, and configuration attributes quickly and accurately.
• Central visibility: Monitor and manage hybrid identity environments from a single, unified interface.

Identity is Too Critical to Leave Unprotected or Under Protected

Why accept the risk of incomplete or manual protection for your most critical identity systems? With a unified hybrid identity protection strategy, you can:

• Recover faster from cyberattacks or operational mistakes.
• Eliminate blind spots in your identity infrastructure.
• Fulfill your part in the shared responsibility model for Entra ID.
• Enable secure access to applications and data.

How Commvault Delivers Unified Hybrid Identity Resilience

In the face of deletion, corruption, or cyberattacks, Commvault® Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory delivers fast recovery and enables continuous business across the enterprise. With Commvault Cloud, you can protect AD and Entra ID in hybrid environments with a single enterprise solution that also protects your on-premises and cloud workloads and applications like Microsoft 365, Dynamics 356, Salesforce, and more.

Automated, frequent backups – Protect against lost domain information with regular, automated backups of objects and attributes.

Comprehensive coverage – Safeguard critical AD objects, including Group Policy Objects, users, groups, and all their relationships, as well as Entra ID enterprise applications, roles, conditional access policies, and more.

Fast, granular recovery – Restore only the missing, damaged, or misconfigured object attributes to get business systems or users back online quickly without the need for a full environment recovery.

Automated forest recovery of AD – Reduce the time to recover AD after a cyberattack with automated, orchestrated recovery of an entire AD forest, featuring custom runbook generation and point-and-click simplicity.

Interactive domain and tenant-wide comparisons – Identify all changes to the AD domain or Entra ID tenant and quickly recover mistakenly or maliciously deleted objects or roll back overwritten attributes across the entire directory.

Centralized management – View and manage hybrid identity protection alongside all your workloads through a single, unified interface.

Do you have gaps in your identity protection strategy? Explore our Backup & Recovery for Active Directory solution or chat with a Commvault representative today. Get started.

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Learn More

Check out these other blogs in our Active Directory series:

• From Mishaps to Meltdowns: Safeguard Your Active Directory
• The Business Impact of Active Directory Outages: Real-World Costs
• Active Directory Forest Recovery: Why Manual Methods Are No Longer Viable
• Five Critical AD Backup Capabilities Most Organizations Are Missing
• AD Recovery Testing: How to Know Your Recovery Plan Will Actually Work

Watch our on-demand webinar “From Mishaps to Meltdowns” to see experts simulate a real-world Active Directory outage and demonstrate rapid restoration techniques.