Your organization just got hit with a ransomware attack. Your cyber andIT departments are scrambling to get your incident response plan started andoperational. All of a sudden, everyone realizes that they cannot log in to anything.Active Directory (AD) must be offline!? Your organization’s authentication andauthorization tools are impacted.
After hours of triage andassessing the size of this problem, your cyber incident response team reports that restoring foundational AD andauthentication andauthorization services will take over a week, if everything goes well.
You thought your resiliency plan with AD backups anda SaaS identity platform was sufficient. But even with SaaS in the mix, recovery is complex andmanual, delaying the path back to minimum viable operationswhen time matters most.Resiliencemeans you can restore authentication andauthorization quickly andpredictably in a trusted way, whether the disruption is malicious activity, an outage, or an accidental misconfiguration.
Understanding the Threat
Attackers target AD because it’s the identity control plane. Once they get a foothold, they’ll often establish persistence by creating shadow or backdoor accounts, then harvest credentials, andescalate privileges. With elevated access, they laterally move across systems andapplications, sometimes staying quiet long enough that the first clear signal is when authentication starts failing.
They gain a wealth of knowledge of the organizations network, people, andapplications. And when they’re ready to maximize impact, they can encrypt or corrupt the AD forest, disrupting logins andcomplicating recovery across the environment.
Why Identity (andWhy AD First)?
It’s common for an organization’s identity stack, especially AD andEntra ID, to become complex over time. Forests expand, permissions sprawl, legacy policies accumulate, and“good enough” processes often turn into long-term security drift. That complexity creates blind spots, anddefenders lose crisp visibility into how roles, privileges, andpolicies evolve.
And it’s never “just AD.” Identity is an ecosystem: identity governance andaccess solutions (IGA), privileged access, customer identity, identity providers, authentication databases, andsingle sign-on all connect back to the same truth. That’s why identity incidents (andeven everyday misconfigurations) can cause outsized disruption compared to many other infrastructure failures.
The recovery challenge is where most plans get exposed. Even with backups, forest recovery is a multi-step, high-stakes process, where guidance for manual recovery can involve 50 to 100 (or more) individual steps andcan take days to weeks, depending on environment complexity andpreparedness.
The real question isn’t “do we have backups?” it’s “can the teams leverage the backups to cleanly execute under pressure, andhave runbooks been tested andverified so recovery doesn’t become an error‑prone scramble at the worst possible time?”
The Solution
The need to have a recovery plan is great. It needs to be tested andverified. Organizations need to know andunderstandthat your identity management platform is the No. 1 target for cyber criminals andattacks. It needs to be protected as such. It needs to be backed up, tested, andverified it can be recovered. This includes:
- Backups of AD, Entra ID, andIGA platforms.
- Tested andverified recovery plans.
- Isolated recovery environments andCleanroom Recovery.
- AD recovery workflow andautomation.
Strong identity governance andmonitoring are still critical, but they’re only part of the equation. You want the ability to detect suspicious identity behavior early, contain it fast, andrecover with confidence when something changes that shouldn’t (whether it’s malicious activity or an accidental modification that breaks authentication).
That also means you need to integrate identity account anduser activity into SecOps andcontinuously watch for signals like unauthorized account creation, privilege changes, andabnormal authentication patterns, andhave a recovery path that’s proven, repeatable, andclean.
Commvault andDeloitte: A Partnership for Identity Resilience
Identity resilience is a business challenge that requires strong governance, processes, controls, andenabling technology. That’s why Deloitte andCommvault have partnered to deliver comprehensive identity protection, recovery, andresilience programs that organizations can trust when it matters most.
Deloitte brings deep expertise in cyber risk, enterprise resilience, andidentity andaccess management to help Fortune 100 to 1000 organizations design, implement, andoperationalize identity resilience programs.
These programs help clients assess security posture, improve detection andresponse capabilities, anddefine minimum viable company requirements, andthen build tested, verified recovery plans with clear timelines andaccountability across business andIT stakeholders. Deloitte turns identity resilience into an executable program with runbooks, testing, andreadiness, so teams know what “prepared” looks like under pressure.
Commvault makes resilience programs operational with integrated protection andautomated recovery workflows across identity systems, plus Commvault AirGapandCleanroom Recoveryto support repeatable, clean, validated recovery when it matters most. Commvault provides the technology foundation with identity resilience capabilities that include:
- Protection for critical identity systems, including AD andEntra ID, point-in-time comparison androllback support for unwanted or accidental changes.
- Auditing anddetection to surface suspicious modifications early (who changed what, andwhen), helping reduce the window for attackers to spread or persist.
- Automated recovery workflows, including forest-level recovery automation, to help reduce the manual burden anderror risk during identity restoration.
- Commvault Cleanroom to help validate identity recovery in isolation before reintroducing trust back into production.
- Commvault AirGapto help maintain immutable, air-gapped backup copies, creating a protected foundation that supports clean recovery andcleanroom testing when identity (or the environment around it) can’t be trusted.
Take Action
If you want to pressure-test your cyber recovery readiness, start with a Deloitte Active Directory Workshop to map dependencies andproduce a clear, actionable plan to recover AD andworkloads to production. Then validate it the right way: using Commvault to rehearse recovery in a cleanroom before you ever need it in a real event.
For organizations ready to take the next step, we can extend this into a 30-day pilot that puts clean recovery andtesting into motion with real artifacts andmeasurable outcomes. Contact your Deloitte representative at commvaultsalesteam@deloitte.comor your Commvault representative atdeloittealliance@commvault.comfor more information.Dave Nowak is Cyber Defense & Resilience Principal at Deloitte, andMichael Fasulo is Senior Director, Portfolio Marketing, at Commvault.






