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Microsoft Active Directory

Active Directory (AD) controls user access to network resources, making it a prime target for attackers. Safeguard your AD from deletion, corruption, and attacks.

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Accelerate and automate Active Directory forest recovery

See how Commvault Cloud enables rapid, automated recovery of the AD forest after corruption or attack. Eliminate slow and error-prone manual recovery processes and recover AD in a fraction of the time.

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The challenge

Identity is the foundation of your systems

When Active Directory goes offline, your business operations can come to a halt. Are you prepared for the worst-case scenario?  Commvault® Cloud helps provide continuous availability of AD services to minimize downtime and maintain continuous business operations.


9 in 10

cyberattacks target Active Directory


$730k

the potential financial loss from AD outages


Days to weeks

The time it takes to recover Active Directory after an attack using manual recovery methods.

 ¹ Sheridan, K. (2021, May 3). Researchers Explore Active Directory Attack Vectors. Dark Reading. https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/researchers-explore-active-directory-attack-vectors
² Forbes, Understanding The Implications Of Active Directory Outages—And How To Fight Back, September 2024

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Protecting the Crown Jewels: Securing Active Directory against cyber threats

With Active Directory at the center of secure authentication and services, protecting and securing this data is critical. Discover how rapid recovery of your Active Directory can enhance your organization’s cyber resilience.

Accelerate AD recovery

Reduce the time to recover Active Directory after a cyberattack

Manually recovering Active Directory can take anywhere from days to weeks. Commvault Cloud automates the entire AD forest recovery process, reducing the risk of error and accelerating recovery times.


Automated AD forest recovery

Automate the full AD forest recovery process to minimize downtime and maintain continuous business across the enterprise.


Automated recovery runbooks

Streamlines the multi-step process required for Active Directory forest recovery, including all the complex hygiene tasks required to verify consistency in the recovered AD.


Visual AD topology views

Visual topology views of your AD environment enable simple and rapid identification of which domain controllers to restore first and how they should be recovered to accelerate availability of identity services.


Prescriptive runbook views

Step-by-step views of the recovery process offer complete visibility into your progress and how long it will take to get your Active Directory back online.


AD recovery testing

Easily practice your AD disaster and cyber recovery plans regularly in a non-production lab environment during the good times to prepare for the bad times.

Accelerate AD recovery

Find identity risks and respond quickly

Granularity that enables you to view what’s changed in your environment and revert those changes as efficiently as possible to get your business back online fast.


Single-solution identity protection

Comprehensive protection across critical AD and Entra ID objects and attributes including group policy objects, users, groups, and all their relationships.


Interactive comparison reporting

Compare all changes in the AD domain between two points in time, quickly identify the data that needs to be recovered or reverted, and restore it quickly, directly from the report.


Object and attribute-level recovery

Flexible, granular recovery allows administrators to quickly recover only the missing, damaged, or misconfigured object attributes, and get your business systems or users back online quickly.

Whitepaper

Active Directory Forest Recovery

Active Directory forest recovery is foundational to maintaining continuous business after a cyberattack. This whitepaper provides an in-depth overview of AD forest recovery, highlighting essential considerations for planning your recovery strategy.

Our Reach

Supporting more than 100,000 companies

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Analyst Report 

Gartner® Magic Quadrant™

For the 14th time in a row, Commvault has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Backup and Data Protection Platforms.

Resources

View more Active Directory resources

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Protect Active Directory from data loss threats

Dive into the details of how Commvault Cloud protects Active Directory from threats in this datasheet.
Read more about Protect Active Directory from data loss threats
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On-demand webinar: From Mishaps to Meltdowns

Join Commvault experts for an immersive webinar where we’ll simulate a real-world Active Directory outage. Witness the cascading effects of AD failure and learn how to accelerate the restoration of AD– and business operations – fast.
Watch now about On-demand webinar: From Mishaps to Meltdowns

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Active Directory forest recovery? 

Active Directory forest recovery is the process of recovering the entire AD environment to a functional state after a critical failure or a cyberattack, like ransomware. It involves rebuilding the domains, domain controllers, and reinstating forest-wide services.

With ransomware increasingly targeting critical identity infrastructure, having a well-documented and frequently tested recovery plan to restore and rebuild your entire AD environment to a pre-attack state is essential for maintaining continuous business.

Why do I need a solution for Active Directory forest recovery? Can’t I manually recover the AD forest using Microsoft’s guidance? 

Active Directory forest recovery is a complex, time-consuming, and error-prone process, especially with manual methods. Microsoft’s Active Directory Forest Recovery Guide provides prescriptive guidance for rebuilding an entire AD forest, but it’s intricate and involved. Depending on the complexity of your AD architecture, the process can involve 50 to 100 or more tasks, each of which must be executed in a specific order during the recovery.

Relying on a manual disaster or cyber recovery plan, along with out-of-the-box Microsoft tools, could mean it takes days to restore an entire AD forest. Commvault Cloud automates the full forest recovery process– following the Microsoft recommended approach – including critical hygiene tasks such as seizing FSMO roles and adjusting the RID pool, reducing the risk of human error and enabling you to recover in a fraction of the time.

Are VM snapshots sufficient for AD backup? 

VM snapshots aren’t enough. Due to the multi-master nature of Active Directory, it’s not possible to bring back domain controllers at scale using VM snapshots. Dozens of intricate hygiene steps need to be performed on the recovered domain controller and within AD itself at very specific points throughout the forest recovery. If these steps aren’t followed correctly, you risk introducing new corruption or inconsistencies in the recovered environment that could be very difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.

Can Commvault support protection and recovery of large AD environments?

Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory is designed to manage complex Active Directory setups, including multiple domains and geographically dispersed environments.

When disaster strikes and your business is offline, it’s critical to be able to quickly recovery as much AD infrastructure as possible. During a forest recovery, Commvault enables automated restoration of many domain controllers from each domain, which significantly speeds up the recovery process.  Commvault runbooks also automate the promotion of additional DCs to reestablish the complete infrastructure that was in place before the cyber incident.

Ready to get started? 

Experience Commvault Cloud for Active Directory

Request a demo today.