Energy giant ensures seamless business continuity

Benefits

• Provides easy, granular recovery of AD accounts, groups, GPOs and more — without downtime
• Ensures quick full-forest recovery in case of an AD disaster
• Mitigates the risk of AD downtime that could cost millions of dollars an hour
• Helps maintain market share and confidence with successful yearly audits

The Story

For large enterprises, even an hour of AD downtime can be catastrophic.

Organizations around the world rely on Active Directory (AD) to provide crucial authentication and authorization processes across their IT ecosystems. If AD goes down, the business itself quickly comes to a standstill — and the losses start to mount.

Indeed, one enterprise oil and petrochemical manufacturer recognized that even an hour of AD downtime could cost the company millions of dollars. Moreover, AD downtime would demonstrate a critical weakness in its IT operations, which could damage its stock price and leadership in the marketplace.

Even smaller issues with Active Directory could be damaging for the company. If a user account happened to be accidentally deleted or improperly modified, that person would be unable to access essential IT resources, which could disrupt critical business processes. And being unable to quickly restore a group or a Group Policy object would leave the company vulnerable to data breaches or other security incidents.

Finding the right partner with the right tools is essential.

Like many modern organizations, the energy giant prefers to focus on its core competencies and treat IT as an enabler for its business goals. For reliable AD recovery, it turned to Quest partner Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). A subsidiary of the Tata Group headquartered in India, TCS is the largest IT services company in the world by market capitalization.

To deliver quality IT services to its clients, TCS relies on best-in-class technology solutions, and Recovery Manager for Active Directory from Quest has been a valued component of its portfolio for years. “Active Directory is the backbone of the IT environment for most organizations,” says Suhas Pawar, associate consultant at Tata Consultancy Services. “TCS has used Recovery Manager widely across many different engagements because it delivers peace of mind, providing quick disaster recovery of entire forests, as well as granular recovery of objects and attributes without downtime.”

When TCS began providing IT services for the energy company, the technical team naturally chose Recovery Manager to deliver seamless AD backup and recovery. Recovery Manager for Active Directory enables IT pros to quickly pinpoint and revert changes and deletions of AD objects, and dramatically simplifies the recovery of a domain or forest in the event of major corruption. In fact, its automated recovery functionality can reduce recovery time from forest-level AD corruption by up to 95 percent.

“Native methods for AD recovery involve downtime,” Pawar explains. “And there are actually very few third-party products that enable recovery of Active Directory without downtime. Recovery Manager is the market standard and is widely used across many verticals. Because any AD downtime would be so costly for this client in the oil and gas sector, we chose Recovery Manager for Active Directory for this engagement without hesitation.” 

Quick recovery of AD objects and attributes maintains both productivity and security.

With Recovery Manager for Active Directory in the capable hands of the TCS team, the oil and petrochemical producer does not need to worry that business changes will lead to IT access problems.  

“The company has associates and VIPs who are constantly relocating across the globe,” says Pawar.  “If an individual’s AD account is accidentally deleted, or incorrectly updated, they might not be able to work, which could impact the business’s core functionality. With Recovery Manager, we can granularly restore an entire AD object or a particular attribute in just a few clicks.”  

But the granular recovery capability extends beyond just user accounts. “We also count on the solution to quickly restore AD groups, GPOs and more,” adds Pawar. “Recovery Manager is essential not just for user productivity but also for strong security.” 

Passing annual AD recovery audits is vital for continued market leadership.

Fortunately, the oil and gas producer has not suffered a disaster that has required use of the full-forest recovery capabilities of Recovery Manager. However, TCS is required to demonstrate that it could perform such restores during annual audits. Since both the energy giant and TCS are public companies, the results of those yearly audits are published to stakeholders and the market, including global accounting firms like Deloitte and Ernst & Young — and any negative findings could have serious repercussions for both firms.  

“As part of our audit obligations, we have to demonstrate that we can restore individual AD objects and that, in case of a disaster situation, we can restore the entire Active Directory to a known good state,” Pawar notes. “If we were not able to do so, that would be flagged as a finding in the yearly audit. With Recovery Manager, we have always passed the annual AD recovery audits, maintaining the strong reputation and market valuation of both the energy company and TCS.” 

When it comes to the backbone of your IT infrastructure, don’t settle for less than the best tool and the best partner.

Pawar endorses Recovery Manager whole-heartedly. “I have used Recovery Manager in multiple engagements, and I definitely recommend this product,” he says. “It can restore any account, group or GPO without any downtime, and it also provides quick recovery of the entire domain. Recovery Manager helps us reduce both the recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO).” 

Pawar also sings the praises of partnering with Quest. “Working with Quest has been a wonderful journey,” he notes. “The technical support and account teams are always helpful and flexible when we face any kind of issues. Quest even provides valuable ideas for how we can use Recovery Manager more effectively with our customers, for example, by helping them achieve better cybersecurity resilience. We also value the Quest training opportunities; we now have multiple employees who are certified by Quest, which enables us to bring additional value to clients, as well as inspire confidence that we can run their operations smoothly.”