If you are not actively using Quest’s Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition, or Semperis’ Active Directory Forest Recovery, then the answer is a HARD NO! If you are serious about active directory disaster recovery, traditional backup methods alone are not enough to fully protect your environment.
You can do all the normal backups you want, but it won’t be enough to recover. Those backups certainly won’t be enough to recover timely, and in some cases, not at all.
Yes, even if you are one of the smart ones that does backups of Active Directory, that still won’t be enough and frankly, real backups of Active Directory are rarer than you might think.
In the end, a backup is only as good as its ability to do an effective restore. That is why having a proper active directory backup and recovery strategy matters so much in today’s security landscape.
Think this is just an AD problem? Think again. If AD goes, more than likely, so does your email… your distribution lists, your shared mailboxes, your ability to communicate with anyone in or out of your company. Modern organizations relying heavily on microsoft entra id security also need to think carefully about identity protection and recovery.
Under the covers, all access to data that is protected by Active Directory authentications are Security Identifiers (SID’s). If you restore the data, but don’t have those SID’s, you are not going to be able to access the data. So you can rebuild, or recreate, but you will have lost the SID’s, and once those are gone, you are not getting them back. This is one of the biggest challenges involved in active directory ransomware recovery and identity restoration after an attack.
Have System State backups? Great, what’s your real path to restore that in a way that restores access to pre-ransomware levels? Without one of these tools, take a look at what is involved in doing a full forest recovery.
Frankly, it could be weeks to recover that way. Those are weeks where all business operations are stopped. Plus, once those are restored, you will likely have weeks of having to manually re-apply lost operational changes.
A strong ad disaster recovery plan needs to account for both operational recovery and identity restoration. Without the right tooling, trying to recover Active Directory after ransomware can quickly become a business continuity nightmare.
Why do RMAD DRE and ADFR make a difference? It is a long list. To summarize it as best as I can, it is: frequency of backups, reporting on changes, selective restores of data, and Bare Metal Rebuilds in hours, not weeks. The first time you see these tools in action, it is like magic in all that they can do, how timely they do it, and how effective they are.
For organizations focused on ad forest recovery and reliable entrai d disaster recovery, these tools dramatically reduce downtime and simplify recovery operations after a cyber event. They also play a major role in any serious ransomware recovery plan active directory strategy.
There are lots of good, strong reasons to own one of these two products. If you don’t have one or the other, you are missing out on a slew of useful features. But most importantly, your active directory disaster recovery and cyber attack recovery active directory strategy is sorely lacking.
Have a preference for which product you want? Let us know and we can help you get it in and running. Not sure which you would like? We can help with demos and guidance for which one might be best for you.
Whether your focus is identity recovery after ransomware, faster recovery operations, or strengthening your overall active directory disaster recovery readiness, we are here to help.
Just drop us an email, or send us a contact request.
