Microsoft Active Directory

Active Directory forest recovery is the process of recovering the entire AD environment to a functional state after a critical failure or a cyberattack, like ransomware. It involves rebuilding the domains, domain controllers, and reinstating forest-wide services.

With ransomware increasingly targeting critical identity infrastructure, having a well-documented and frequently tested recovery plan to restore and rebuild your entire AD environment to a pre-attack state is essential for maintaining continuous business.

Active Directory forest recovery is a complex, time-consuming, and error-prone process, especially with manual methods. Microsoft’s Active Directory Forest Recovery Guide provides prescriptive guidance for rebuilding an entire AD forest, but it’s intricate and involved. Depending on the complexity of your AD architecture, the process can involve 50 to 100 or more tasks, each of which must be executed in a specific order during the recovery.

Relying on a manual disaster or cyber recovery plan, along with out-of-the-box Microsoft tools, could mean it takes days to restore an entire AD forest. Commvault automates the full forest recovery process– following the Microsoft recommended approach – including critical hygiene tasks such as seizing FSMO roles and adjusting the RID pool, reducing the risk of human error and enabling you to recover in a fraction of the time.

VM snapshots aren’t enough. Due to the multi-master nature of Active Directory, it’s not possible to bring back domain controllers at scale using VM snapshots. Dozens of intricate hygiene steps need to be performed on the recovered domain controller and within AD itself at very specific points throughout the forest recovery. If these steps aren’t followed correctly, you risk introducing new corruption or inconsistencies in the recovered environment that could be very difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.

Commvault Backup & Recovery for Active Directory is designed to manage complex Active Directory setups, including multiple domains and geographically dispersed environments.  

When disaster strikes and your business is offline, it’s critical to be able to quickly recovery as much AD infrastructure as possible. During a forest recovery, Commvault enables automated restoration of many domain controllers from each domain, which significantly speeds up the recovery process.  Commvault runbooks also automate the promotion of additional DCs to reestablish the complete infrastructure that was in place before the cyber incident.