AD Under Attack: Are You Recovery-Ready?  

Welcome to the final installment of our three-part series on Active Directory. In our previous blog post, we explored small-scale disruptions that could impact AD, such as the accidental deletion of an object, and why fast, granular recovery is so critical.

But what happens when disaster strikes on a grander scale? What about large-scale AD disasters like ransomware attacks or schema corruption? In these scenarios, the recovery process may require a complete AD forest recovery. This involves restoring the directory service, including all domains, domain controllers, and associated data, to a pre-attack state.

The Looming Threat of Ransomware

Imagine this scenario: A ransomware attack strikes your organization, locking down the server that hosts AD. Suddenly, all the files on the server are encrypted, and AD goes offline. Now, all the business-critical applications that depend on AD for user authentication are inaccessible. Employees can’t log in, critical services come to a halt, and business is at a standstill.

The impact of an AD attack that disables domain controllers is real and can be devastating. In 2017, global shipping giant Maersk fell victim to the NotPetya cyberattack, which encrypted the file systems of 45,000 PCs, 4,000 servers, and all but one of its 150 AD domain controllers. With AD completely offline, operations instantly ceased, shutting down 17 global shipping ports and stranding hundreds of container ships for 10 days. In total, the attack cost the company at least $300 million.

Gartner reports that as of this year, 75% of organizations will have experienced at least one cyber incident like ransomware. With such threats looming, having a well-documented and frequently tested recovery plan to restore and rebuild your entire AD environment to a pre-attack state is not just a good idea – it’s critical and the key to getting your business back fast.

Recovering AD Requires a Specific Plan and Process

When disaster strikes, recovering AD is vital, yet traditionally has been very hard to do, requiring intricate, time-consuming, manual processes.

Given that AD is a multi-master, geographically distributed system, restoring it demands meticulous coordination during recovery. Each domain controller must be synchronized and restored in a coordinated manner to avoid data inconsistencies and potential corruption in the recovered directory.

Microsoft’s Active Directory Forest Recovery Guide provides a detailed, step-by-step method for this, which can involve anywhere from 50 to 100, or even more, individual steps, depending on the size of your organization. This complexity can significantly prolong the process if done manually, often taking days to weeks to complete. All the while, business operations cease to function, and users cannot access important applications.

The challenge extends beyond just AD recovery. During a cyberattack, AD recovery is only one part of the equation. Your team also will be recovering data, applications, user endpoints, VMs, and more. Without a holistic approach, these complexities can further prolong outages and downtime.

Introducing: Commvault® Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition

Last week, we announced how we are solving the challenges associated with recovering and rebuilding AD with Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition. It brings a new level of resilience to AD by enabling automated, rapid recovery of the AD forest. This new offering eliminates slow and error-prone manual processes often associated with AD forest recoveries. With Backup & Recovery for AD Enterprise Edition, you will be able to:

• Make AD recovery a snap via automated runbooks: Automated forest recovery runbooks streamline the multi-step process required for AD forest recovery, including the complex hygiene tasks essential for a clean recovery. These runbooks also can be used for regular testing in non-production environments to enhance cyber readiness.
• Enable fast recovery of the most important AD infrastructure: 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 the availability of AD services.
• Accelerate recovery times and advance resilience: Manually recovering an AD forest can take days or even weeks to complete, but with Commvault, you can recover it in a fraction of the time. The Commvault Cloud platform integrates AD forest recovery with granular recovery of both AD and Entra ID, providing comprehensive protection. 

To learn more and demo the solution, visit the Active Directory solution page.

If you missed it, read the full press release here for more details.