Key Takeaways
- Identity infrastructure is a primary attack surface that can halt business operations if compromised.
- Commvault’s vulnerability assessment helps highlight misconfigurations and risky settings through clear exposure indicators and remediation guidance.
- Real-time auditing helps enable teams to detect subtle malicious changes as they happen and trace attacker activity in real time.
- One-click rollback can aid in rapid reversal of unauthorized changes, helping minimize downtime and limit attack spread.
Cybersecurity and the Importance of Identity
When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture stolen files or encrypted databases. But there’s a layer underneath all of that which, if compromised, makes everything else irrelevant – your identity infrastructure.
Identity management systems like Active Directory (AD), Entra ID, and Okta are the systems that decide who gets to log in, what they can access, and whether your business can function at all. When attackers get in there, users can’t authenticate, applications go dark, and operations grind to a halt. It’s not a data problem at that point, it’s a control problem.
Automated forest recovery with clean OS rebuilds helps enable organizations to restore identity systems securely without reintroducing threats. Here’s how.
Know What You’re Vulnerable to Before the Attackers Do
Commvault’s vulnerability assessment gives your AD environment a posture score. Think of it like a health grade for your directory. Most environments have more exposure than people realize, and this makes that visible.
Our tool helps surface indicators of exposure (IOEs), which are specific misconfigurations or risky settings that could be exploited. One common example is accounts with passwords set to never expire. Stale, non-rotating credentials are one of the most common ways attackers maintain long-term access to an environment.
Commvault doesn’t just flag the issue, it helps identify which accounts are affected, walks through remediation steps, and lets you export the list to help simplify scripting the fix.
Catch It While It’s Happening
Knowing your weaknesses is step one. Seeing when someone is actively exploiting them is step two.
Commvault’s identity management auditing helps capture a real-time feed of every change made to identity systems like Active Directory and Entra ID – details like who made the change, when, from where, and what the values looked like before and after.
Attackers don’t usually blow the doors off; they make subtle, targeted changes. A compromised account might create a backdoor user, quietly add it to domain admins, then link a malicious Group Policy Object (GPO) designed to deploy ransomware, and every one of those steps shows up in the audit feed.
Once you spot a suspicious account, filtering can help you instantly pull up every change that account ever made, helping give you the full picture of what the attacker touched.
Undo the Damage Fast
Detection only matters if you can act on it. From the same auditing view, you can roll back a malicious change with a single click, helping restore the environment to its last known good state without jumping between tools or writing a custom script. The aim is to help minimize downtime and limit how far the attack spreads before it is caught.
When the Worst Happens: Forest Recovery
Sometimes an attack gets through, and you need to rebuild from scratch. AD forest recovery, rebuilding your entire directory environment after a ransomware hit, is notoriously complex, often involving 50 to 100+ individual steps, depending on how many domains and domain controllers you have.
Commvault helps automate this with orchestrated runbooks that sequence every step: Rebuilding domain controllers in the right order based on their flexible single master operation (FSMO) roles, restoring SYSVOL, verifying metadata, and re-establishing trust between domains. A topology view of the entire AD forest helps make it visually clear which domain controllers should come back online first.
The standout piece here is what Commvault calls Clean OS Recovery. Instead of restoring potentially compromised virtual machines, it rebuilds domain controllers on brand-new VMs. Restoring an infected machine risks bringing the malware right back with it. Recovering onto fresh infrastructure means you’re not just getting your data back; you’re actually starting clean.
One Dashboard for On-Premises and Cloud
Most organizations today aren’t running purely on-premises or purely in the cloud, they’re hybrid, with AD handling legacy access and Entra ID handling modern cloud-based identities. Commvault’s unified control plane can help cover both from a single console: assessments, auditing, detection, and recovery across both platforms.
The value is straightforward: fewer tools, less complexity, and a cleaner story to tell leadership when they ask how identity infrastructure is being protected end to end.
Identity resilience deserves its own dedicated conversation, separate from making backups and separate from protecting endpoints. The combination of proactive vulnerability scanning, real-time change auditing, fast rollback, and clean forest recovery helps your organization treat your directory infrastructure as a security priority in its own right.
FAQs
Q: Why is identity infrastructure such a critical security focus?
A: Identity systems control authentication and access across an organization. If compromised, attackers can disrupt operations entirely, making other security measures irrelevant.
Q: What are indicators of exposure (IOEs)?
A: IOEs are specific misconfigurations or risky settings in identity environments that attackers can exploit. Discovering them can provide visibility into weaknesses and help guide teams on how to fix them.
Q: How does real-time auditing help stop attacks?
A: Real-time auditing helps track every change in identity systems, including who made it and what changed. This visibility helps security teams detect suspicious behavior early and investigate the full scope of an attack.
Q: Can malicious changes really be undone quickly?
A: Yes, Commvault can help enable direct rollback of unauthorized changes from the same interface. This helps reduce response time and restore systems to a safe state without complex scripting.
Q: What makes AD forest recovery so challenging?
A: Rebuilding an AD forest involves many interdependent steps, including restoring domain controllers and reestablishing trust relationships. The complexity increases with the size of the environment.
Q: What is Commvault’s Clean OS Recovery, and why does it matter?
A: Clean OS Recovery helps rebuild domain controllers on new, uncompromised systems instead of restoring infected machines. This approach helps eliminate lingering malware and can help enable a secure recovery.
Nico Guerrera is Senior Technical Marketing Manager at Commvault.
