Disaster Recovery for Identity
Minutes matter. Fast and secure AD and Entra ID recovery is vital following a ransomware attack. The longer these critical identity services are down, the longer your business is down. But when disaster strikes, you can recover 90% faster with Quest while saving millions in downtime and mitigation costs.
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The power of SaaS-delivered disaster recovery
Disaster Recovery for Identity protects AD and Entra ID from a single cloud platform, delivering secure, malware-free recovery with high availability and instant restoration. As the first-to-market comprehensive SaaS-based disaster recovery solution for on-premises AD environments, it's always on, always updated and always available via the Quest unified identity cloud platform.
- Supporting critical on-premises infrastructure — Despite the growing adoption of cloud technologies, many industries—such as banking, government, insurance, and healthcare—remain deeply entrenched in their on-premises infrastructure due to regulatory and operational requirements. When attacks occur, the traditional separation between AD admin teams and security teams often causes delays, confusion, and significant business impact.
- Efficiency and speed in recovery — While traditional enterprise backup solutions can take days or weeks to restore operations, Disaster Recovery for Identity recovers systems in minutes or hours, significantly reducing downtime when the cost can exceed $1M/hour. This rapid recovery capability is a key differentiator compared to other Active Directory backup and recovery methods.
- Comprehensive protection through a single interface — Modern disaster recovery solutions should be part of a single interface for managing the entire security lifecycle. Our unified approach aligns with frameworks like the NIST CSF, covering all pillars: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover, and Govern. This empowers IT teams to manage the entire recovery process independently, without requiring coordination between multiple teams.
- Lower costs and enhanced security — By leveraging cloud-based recovery, organizations can eliminate server and operating system costs while also reducing hardware expenses over time. The solution is particularly valuable for organizations with regulatory constraints that prevent them from fully migrating to the cloud, allowing them to benefit from enhanced security features provided by cloud providers like Microsoft.
Key Benefits
Rapidly recover from AD disasters
Deploy proven automation and flexibility in recovery options, malware protection, and other best-in-class disaster recovery capabilities that slash recovery time.
Protect identities with immutable backups
Reduce attack surface and keep backups readily available with immutable cloud storage for AD identities, objects and configurations.
Improve security and compliance
Satisfy regulatory and internal security requirements with validated supply chain risk management practices that exceed industry standards.
Maximize availability
Instantly start recovery of on-prem Active Directory when on-prem systems are compromised or unavailable.
Reduce footprint and lower costs
Operate world-class AD backup and disaster recovery from the cloud, satisfying SaaS-only strategies.
Streamline operations
Control Active Directory and Entra ID backup and recovery from a single console and common interface to reduce training and admin costs.
Real-world impact and protection
Preventing extreme recovery measures
A notable example of the challenges faced during recovery comes from a major global shipping company that experienced a severe cyberattack. Following the incident, the organization had to fly a team member to another continent to retrieve an offline Active Directory server that remained unaffected by the attack. With Disaster Recovery for Identity, such drastic measures are unnecessary, as the solution allows for centralized control and recovery from any location regardless of your global footprint.
Protecting your reputation
Beyond financial implications, prolonged downtime can damage an organization's reputation. The longer systems are down, the more likely it is to attract negative attention from the media and customers. Disaster Recovery for Identity not only restores operations quickly but also helps protect your organization's reputation by minimizing incident impact.
Built on the Quest unified identity cloud platform
Disaster Recovery for Identity is built on the Quest unified identity cloud platform, which has migrated 100 petabytes of data to date, backed up over 37 billion Entra ID objects over a 12-month period, and helped customers reduce their identity attack surface by over 99%. The platform is ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018 certified and is backed by an award-winning, global support team ready to help 24/7/365. Quest simplifies identity security by equipping operators with better tools and resources, improving effectiveness while reducing the need for extensive training.
FAQ
In the event of a scorched earth attack — i.e., your entire on-premises environment is compromised by something like ransomware — even the most robust on-premises recovery solution will require hardware provisioning and installation before starting recovery procedures. Not to mention getting access to on-premises backups, if you can at all. When the cost of downtime can exceed $1M/hour, having an immediately-available SaaS solution with cloud backups allows you to instantly start recovery, saving not only money but brand reputation.
With Microsoft-provided tools and manual processes, Active Directory forest recovery is a difficult, time-consuming and error-prone process. In fact, Microsoft’s Active Directory Forest Recovery Guide outlines 40 high-level steps that must be performed correctly and in the proper sequence — on each DC. In addition, many of the steps aren’t operations that AD administrators are familiar with; they are tedious, often command-line based steps, so it’s very easy to make mistakes that can re-corrupt your directory and require you to start over. Quest reduces risk by automating every one of these manual steps.
VM snapshots are no substitute for an enterprise AD disaster recovery solution. Using snapshots for forest recovery will almost always result in data consistency problems that are difficult to resolve. Since the data on DCs is constantly being updated and the replication process takes time, snapshots of different DCs almost always contain inconsistent information. Snapshots can also include malware, which gets restored with everything else on the DC. Plus, if you store your VM snapshots in the default location, they’re an obvious target for ransomware encryption, which can render them useless. There’s also a logistical issue. Usually, control over VM snapshots resides with the virtualization operations team, which complicates the AD team’s job during the recovery operation. Finally, the virtualization team might not even know that the AD snapshots are an essential part of the organization’s disaster recovery strategy, so they might not protect the AD snapshots appropriately.
An immutable backup is a duplicate copy of data that cannot be altered or removed for a specified timeframe. It’s another method your organization can use to protect valuable data from threats ranging from cyberattacks to accidental removal. When it comes to Active Directory security, Quest solutions provide multiple storage locations for AD backups, with many organizations choosing to have a dedicated backup location for their identity team that does not rely on traditional backup teams (since traditional backup teams often rely upon Active Directory for authentication). While some organizations can choose to store backups inside enterprise backup storage, you should validate that there are authentication capabilities to retrieve those backups that do not require Active Directory. Because we’ve seen physical destruction, as well as loss of connectivity to the internet, we recommend that your backups are air-gapped or on immutable storage.