Commvault, a leading provider of cyber resilience and data protection solutions for the hybrid cloud, is announcing an expansion of the Commvault Cloud platform to deliver full, automated forest recovery for Microsoft Active Directory (AD). Traditionally difficult to recover at scale—though increasingly prone to malicious activity—Commvault’s coverage of Microsoft AD affords its customers business continuity post-cyberattack.
Adding onto Commvault’s already extensive protection of workloads, the introduction of Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition advances into the widely used space of Microsoft AD—often called the “backbone of enterprise IT,” according to Commvault. With AD managing authentication for over 610 million users worldwide, the protection of these workloads is crucial—yet complicated.
“Active Directory continues to be a target, and we've seen an increase in it being targeted by malicious activity. [And] I think the reason is obvious: It's the keys to the kingdom,” said Tim Zonca, VP of portfolio marketing at Commvault. “But the recovery, especially at scale, is really complex.”
“If you think about an Active Directory topology, you have a set of domains, domain controllers…[and] on those kinds of branches are various sets of users and groups. And so, it's not just flipping the switch and bringing Active Directory back to a previous state; there's a sophisticated set of steps that are required to bring this back up and running,” Zonca explained.
Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition streamlines this complexity by enabling the automated, rapid recovery of the AD forest—from users to groups, permissions, and domain controllers across the enterprise—and eliminating various error-prone, manual processes. While undoubtedly useful for large-scale organizations using AD, Commvault’s capabilities are designed to be simplistic enough that they are beneficial for smaller enterprises lacking the resources that massive businesses have.
Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition is composed of three major capabilities:
- Streamlined recovery of AD through automated runbooks, easing the multi-step forest recovery process and capable of executing tasks such as transferring key roles from an unavailable domain controller to a functioning one
- Rapid recovery of the most critical AD infrastructure with a visual topology map that visualizes an organization's unique AD environment, informing which domain controllers should restored first and how they should be recovered
- Faster recovery times and advanced resilience through the integration of Commvault’s Cloud platform into AD forest recovery that enables the granular recovery of Active Directory and Entra ID, the cloud-based identity service
Giving “the user an interactive topology makes it easy for them to see where they're going to start their recovery process,” said Zonca. “These attacks have gotten so broad, [and] the active directory structure is really vast—so being able to visualize that allows the human brain to have a much easier sense of, ‘Where do I want this recovery process to begin?’”
Ultimately, "Recovering Active Directory is foundational to maintaining continuous business after a cyberattack, yet traditional methods are too complex and prone to error," according to Pranay Ahlawat, chief technology and AI officer, Commvault. "With automated Active Directory forest recovery, we are giving customers game-changing recovery capabilities, and by integrating this into our unique cyber resilience platform with broad workload support, we're bringing a new era of continuous business to our customers that nobody can match."
To learn more about Commvault, please visit https://www.commvault.com/.