As businesses continue to expand their digital footprints across on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments, Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) have become essential tools for managing identity and access. These systems form the backbone of authentication and authorization—granting or denying access to everything from internal applications and SaaS tools to entire production environments.
But with great power comes great responsibility—and risk.
AD and Entra ID aren’t just user directories. Together, they act as the gatekeepers of your enterprise’s digital kingdom. Any misstep, whether it’s a weak password, misconfiguration, or forgotten account, can be exploited by attackers to gain access, escalate privileges, and disrupt business operations. Protecting these critical systems isn’t just IT hygiene—it’s a cybersecurity imperative.
AD + Entra ID: A Unified Identity Strategy with Unified Risk
Active Directory has long been the industry standard for on-premises identity management, while Entra ID extends those capabilities to the cloud—powering secure access to Microsoft 365, Azure services, and thousands of third-party applications. Many businesses operate in a hybrid identity model, where AD and Entra ID work in tandem to manage user identities across different environments.
But this interconnectedness also means that a compromise in one can impact the other.
Whether you’re syncing identities using Azure AD Connect, managing access with Conditional Access Policies, or leveraging single sign-on (SSO) across platforms, protecting both environments equally is vital. A breach in AD can easily cascade into Entra ID, and vice versa.
Four Key Considerations for Keeping Active Directory and Entra ID Secure
- Frequent Backups: Don't Let the Directory Go Dark
AD and Entra ID are constantly evolving - users are added or removed, permissions change, and policies are updated. Frequent, automated backups are essential to capture this dynamic environment.
While Active Directory allows for some object recovery via tombstoning, it’s not enough. And Entra ID, being cloud-native, doesn’t offer the same level of native backup and recovery tools—making third-party protection even more critical.
A Backup as a Service (BaaS) solution optimized for hybrid environments helps:
- Secure both AD and Entra ID data in one place
- Automate backups across both platforms
- Enable fast, flexible recovery—whether on-prem or in the cloud
- Store data in isolated, secure locations to prevent ransomware impact
- Build vs. Buy: Unified Protection Requires Unified Strategy
You can cobble together scripts and open-source tools to protect AD or Entra ID separately—but should you?
Homegrown solutions often fall short when trying to orchestrate protection across both environments. They create silos, increase complexity, and require constant upkeep. Instead, businesses should consider a centralized, SaaS-based data protection solution designed specifically to handle both AD and Entra ID with:
- Seamless integration across on-prem and cloud
- Centralized management and visibility
- Encryption and zero-trust principles built in
- Protection from insider threats and external attacks
The goal isn’t just protection—it’s resilience, across your entire identity estate.
- Granular Recovery: Attributes Matter More Than You Think
A finely tuned directory structure in Active Directory or Entra ID often reflects years of careful planning. Organizational Units (OUs), group policies, role-based access controls, and security groups are meticulously defined.
Losing or corrupting this configuration can result in:
- Misaligned permissions
- Broken application access
- Locked-out users
- Increased vulnerability to attacks
With a dedicated data protection solution, administrators can:
- Restore individual users or attributes
- Revert specific misconfigurations
- Recover objects in-place without needing full environment restores
And this isn’t just about AD—Entra ID also benefits from granular rollback, especially when dealing with complex cloud-based role assignments, app registrations, and access policies.
- Ransomware Loves AD and Entra ID
Because AD and Entra ID are central to access, they’re also central targets for ransomware. Attackers exploit these systems to gain control, escalate privileges, and spread laterally across environments—often undetected.
A breach in AD can open the door to cloud environments via synced identities in Entra ID. Similarly, a compromise in Entra ID could expose cloud-first applications and user credentials synced back to on-prem.
Effective protection includes:
- Air-gapped backups of AD and Entra ID configurations
- Immutable data copies that can’t be tampered with
- AI-powered threat detection and anomaly monitoring
- Role-based access to limit administrative exposure
Organizations need to view ransomware defence holistically—not just for endpoint or storage protection, but as a key component of identity resilience.
Closing the Recovery Gap: One Platform for Unified Identity Protection
Modern businesses can’t afford a fragmented approach to identity protection. Whether you're cloud-first, hybrid, or still managing on-prem domains, you need a platform that understands and protects both AD and Entra ID as a unified system.
With a purpose-built solution like Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI, organizations can:
- Centralize backup and recovery for both AD and Entra ID
- Secure data with encryption, immutability, and isolation
- Detect ransomware threats early and respond rapidly
- Enable granular recovery of directory attributes, groups, and roles
- Maintain compliance with built-in long-term retention
Commvault Cloud: End-to-End Protection for Identity Infrastructure
With broad coverage across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments, Commvault Cloud offers unified management for managing, protecting, and recovering identity systems. Whether it’s a local AD controller or your cloud-based Entra ID environment, your data is safe, compliant, and recoverable.
Key Benefits:
- Frequent, automated backups for AD and Entra ID
- Air-gapped, secure storage to isolate critical identity data
- Immutable backups for ransomware resilience
- Granular restores to rapidly recover from incidents
- AI-driven threat detection to spot attacks early
- Seamless, unified management from one platform
Final Thoughts: Don't Leave Identity to Chance
The stakes have never been higher. Identity is the new perimeter—and Active Directory and Entra ID are the heart of it all. Protecting them requires more than hope and legacy tools. It demands a modern, integrated, and intelligent approach.
If you’re ready to strengthen your identity resilience and close the data recovery gap, Commvault is here to help.
Email:
Phone: 021 312 714
Craig Sargent
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