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Active Directory Forest Recovery: How to Restore Business-Critical Services Faster

Active Directory (AD)

is the backbone of most enterprise IT environments—and when it goes down, business comes to a halt. Every minute of downtime prevents employees from logging in, stops applications from running, and disrupts critical operations. Yet recovering AD after a cyberattack or disaster has historically been one of the most complex, time-consuming, and error-prone IT tasks.

This whitepaper explores the challenges of Active Directory forest recovery and outlines how enterprises can minimize downtime and risk. You’ll learn what’s required to plan, test, and execute an AD forest recovery and how automation can help you recover in hours instead of days or weeks.

What You’ll Learn

  • Why Active Directory is both critical and highly vulnerable to cyberattacks like ransomware.
  • The hidden complexities of AD forest recovery across multiple domains and geographies.
  • Key steps for developing a tested and reliable recovery plan, including:
    • Planning your AD recovery architecture and priorities.
    • Designing a backup strategy that ensures resilience.
    • Executing essential “hygiene” tasks to prevent corruption during recovery.
  • The three phases of an AD forest recovery and how to execute them effectively.
  • Why manual methods can take days—and how automated recovery runbooks accelerate the process.
  • How Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory enables fast, reliable, and automated recovery to keep your business running.