Your organization just got hit with a ransomware attack. Your cyber yIT departments are scrambling to get your incident response plan started yoperational. All of a sudden, everyone realizes that they cannot log in to anything.Active Directory (AD) must be offline!? Your organization’s authentication yauthorization tools are impacted.
After hours of triage yassessing the size of this problem, your cyber incident response team reports that restoring foundational AD yauthentication yauthorization services will take over a week, if everything goes well.
You thought your resiliency plan with AD backups ya SaaS identity platform was sufficient. But even with SaaS in the mix, recovery is complex ymanual, delaying the path back to minimum viable operationswhen time matters most.Resilienciameans you can restore authentication yauthorization quickly ypredictably 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, yescalate privileges. With elevated access, they laterally move across systems yapplications, 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, yapplications. And when they’re ready to maximize impact, they can encrypt or corrupt the AD forest, disrupting logins ycomplicating recovery across the environment.
Why Identity (yWhy AD First)?
It’s common for an organization’s identity stack, especially AD yEntra ID, to become complex over time. Forests expand, permissions sprawl, legacy policies accumulate, y“good enough” processes often turn into long-term security drift. That complexity creates blind spots, ydefenders lose crisp visibility into how roles, privileges, ypolicies evolve.
And it’s never “just AD.” Identity is an ecosystem: identity governance yaccess solutions (IGA), privileged access, customer identity, identity providers, authentication databases, ysingle sign-on all connect back to the same truth. That’s why identity incidents (yeven 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 ycan take days to weeks, depending on environment complexity ypreparedness.
The real question isn’t “do we have backups?” it’s “can the teams leverage the backups to cleanly execute under pressure, yhave runbooks been tested yverified so recovery doesn’t become an error‑prone scramble at the worst possible time?”
La solución
The need to have a recovery plan is great. It needs to be tested yverified. Organizations need to know yunderstythat your identity management platform is the No. 1 target for cyber criminals yattacks. It needs to be protected as such. It needs to be backed up, tested, yverified it can be recovered. This includes:
- Backups of AD, Entra ID, yIGA platforms.
- Tested yverified recovery plans.
- Isolated recovery environments yCleanroom.
- AD recovery workflow yautomation.
Strong identity governance ymonitoring are still critical, but they’re only part of the equation. You want the ability to detect suspicious identity behavior early, contain it fast, yrecover 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 yuser activity into SecOps ycontinuously watch for signals like unauthorized account creation, privilege changes, yabnormal authentication patterns, yhave a recovery path that’s proven, repeatable, yclean.
Commvault yDeloitte: A Partnership for Identity Resiliencia
La resiliencia de la identidad is a business challenge that requires strong governance, processes, controls, yenabling technology. That’s why Deloitte yCommvault have partnered to deliver comprehensive identity protection, recovery, yresilience programs that organizations can trust when it matters most.
Deloitte brings deep expertise in cyber risk, enterprise resilience, yidentity yaccess management to help Fortune 100 to 1000 organizations design, implement, yoperationalize identity resilience programs.
These programs help clients assess security posture, improve detection yresponse capabilities, ydefine minimum viable company requirements, ythen build tested, verified recovery plans with clear timelines yaccountability across business yIT stakeholders. Deloitte turns identity resilience into an executable program with runbooks, testing, yreadiness, so teams know what “prepared” looks like under pressure.
Commvault makes resilience programs operational with integrated protection yautomated recovery workflows across identity systems, plus Commvault AirGapyCleanroomto 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 yEntra ID, point-in-time comparison yrollback support for unwanted or accidental changes.
- Auditing ydetection to surface suspicious modifications early (who changed what, ywhen), helping reduce the window for attackers to spread or persist.
- Automated recovery workflows, including forest-level recovery automation, to help reduce the manual burden yerror 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 ycleanroom 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 yproduce a clear, actionable plan to recover AD yworkloads 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 ytesting into motion with real artifacts ymeasurable outcomes. Contact your Deloitte representative at commvaultsalesteam@deloitte.comor your Commvault representative atdeloittealliance@commvault.compara obtener más información.Dave Nowak is Cyber Defense & Resiliencia Principal at Deloitte, yMichael Fasulo is Senior Director, Portfolio Marketing, at Commvault.






