Commvault has released Active Directory protection to enhance its cloud-based platform.
Protecting Microsoft Active Directory is vital for enterprises to ensure secure and uninterrupted operations. AD is the backbone of enterprise IT, managing authentication and access for over 610 million users worldwide, spanning millions of organizations across industries and company sizes. It regulates access to essential resources, including applications, databases and physical security systems. Its central role makes it a prime target for cyberattacks, where a compromised AD can disrupt critical processes, delay services, or even halt operations.
Recently, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance issued warnings about persistent cyber threats targeting AD, highlighting its vulnerabilities and critical role in enterprise networks. It is important to understand the importance of AD, the impacts of security breaches affecting it, and how Commvault is addressing these vulnerabilities.
Why Active Directory has such a significant business impact
AD breaches and disruptions pose significant risks to the disruption of operations, finances and reputation across industries. A compromised AD can halt factory production, ground airline operations, or block employee access to critical systems. Attackers often exploit AD to spread malware, compounding the damage. The financial impacts are significant, with direct and indirect costs including remediation, legal fees and regulatory fines.
The consequences of AD violations go beyond immediate outages. Organizations may face higher cyber insurance premiums, lower credit ratings and exposure of sensitive customer data. Breaches also strain customer relationships and expose intellectual property, creating long-term operational challenges. Strong AD security measures are essential to reduce these risks and ensure business continuity.
The Five Eyes advisory highlights 17 critical types of Active Directory attacks, such as password spraying, Kerberoasting and golden ticket attacks, as well as weaknesses in trust configurations and credential storage.
Several major AD breaches illustrate the dangers. In 2018, Ticketmaster suffered an incident where hackers accessed 1.3 terabytes of customer data. In 2021, an AT&T data breach exposed 73 million customer records. A massive cyber attack on national public data in April 2024 compromised up to 2.9 billion records. And the list goes on.
How Commvault addresses Active Directory security challenges
Commvault has just introduced Cloud Backup & Recovery for Active Directory Enterprise Edition to simplify and automate the recovery of AD forests. Traditionally, forest recovery involves manual steps such as resetting domain controllers, rebuilding trust relationships, synchronizing data, and sequencing recovery tasks, all of which are error-prone and can cause extended downtime unproductive. Recovering an AD forest is complex, requiring 50 to 100 steps or more to return it to its pre-attack state, which can take days or weeks. Commvault Cloud Platform now integrates AD forest recovery with granular recovery of both Active Directory and Entra ID, the cloud-based identity service. By automating these critical recovery steps, Commvault’s solution should help reduce downtime, minimize disruption, and ensure faster restoration of AD environments.
“Active Directory recovery is fundamental to maintaining business continuity after a cyberattack, yet traditional methods are too complex and error-prone,” said Pranay Ahlawat, Commvault’s chief technology and AI officer. Key features include automated recovery playbooks that guide IT teams through the restoration process and handle tasks such as transferring roles from unavailable domain controllers and sequencing the recovery of AD components. Visual topology mapping provides an interactive overview of the AD environment, allowing IT teams to prioritize recovery efforts.
Commvault’s platform also integrates AD recovery with other workloads that affect databases and cloud environments, thereby streamlining IT operations and improving governance. Proactive testing and validation capabilities help identify process gaps, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations before they result in downtime. By automating recovery processes, the solution can also lower recovery costs, help reduce reliance on specialized personnel, and allow IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
Improving active directory protection to increase cyber resilience
Cyberattacks targeting identity infrastructure, particularly Microsoft’s AD, have become increasingly frequent and sophisticated. When AD experiences downtime, the consequences can be far-reaching, even cutting off employee access to essential tools such as email and payroll systems.
Recognizing these challenges, enterprises require a reliable and automated solution for rapid recovery to minimize potential damage. Commvault’s AD solution addresses these issues by automating the complex and time-consuming steps of AD recovery. Better yet, this solution is housed within the same Commvault Cloud platform that protects a variety of other critical workloads. With its expected release in the first quarter of 2025, the new product aims to provide organizations with a practical approach to securing and recovering their identity infrastructure, increasing readiness to face cybersecurity challenges.
