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09/07/2026 3:22 pm
TL;DR: Active Directory remains a high-value target because compromise can enable lateral movement, privilege escalation, and ransomware across enterprise identity estates, while recovery gaps around offline backups, break-glass accounts, and tested forest restoration prolong outages, according to Commvault. The governance problem is not just backup availability but whether identity recovery is validated before a crisis.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Commvault: Active Directory resilience and recovery best practices
By the numbers:
- 90% of Global 2000 organizations rely on AD, rely on AD for core identity and access management.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams test Active Directory recovery after a compromise?
A: They should test the full forest recovery process, not just the restoration of individual servers.
Q: Why do break-glass accounts need special governance in Active Directory?
A: Break-glass accounts preserve access when normal directory controls fail, so they must be isolated, monitored, and protected with stronger controls than routine administrative accounts.
Q: What breaks when AD backups are not immutable and offline?
A: The recovery path becomes vulnerable to the same ransomware or destructive actions that hit production.
Practitioner guidance
- Test forest recovery as a security exercise Run tabletop and technical simulations that restore the entire AD forest to a known-good state, then verify trust, replication, and administrative access before declaring success.
- Isolate and vault break-glass accounts Keep emergency Tier-0 accounts disconnected from normal directory sync, store credentials in a secure vault, and audit every access event and rotation step.
- Prove backup immutability and recoverability Store directory backups offline and immutable, then test them in an isolated environment to confirm they can be restored without introducing attacker state.
What's in the full article
Commvault's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step guidance for forest recovery planning across domain controllers and identity tiers.
- Operational handling of break-glass accounts, including vaulting, rotation, and audit expectations.
- Recovery-readiness practices for immutable backup storage and isolated restore validation.
- The joint service model for combining recovery tooling with implementation support in hybrid identity environments.
👉 Read Commvault's guidance on Active Directory resilience and identity recovery →
Active Directory resilience: are your recovery plans actually tested?
Explore further
09/07/2026 3:40 pm
Active Directory resilience is really identity recovery governance. The article correctly treats recovery as a strategic control problem, not a backup checkbox. In identity terms, the issue is whether the organisation can re-establish trust in the directory after compromise, which means recovery design, offline storage, and validation exercises all matter together. Practitioners should evaluate AD resilience as part of the identity control plane, not as an infrastructure afterthought.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Another finding in the same research shows that 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable for Active Directory resilience and recovery readiness?
A: Accountability usually sits across IAM, PAM, infrastructure, and security operations, but the owner must be explicit because AD is a shared control plane. The team responsible for identity trust should prove that recovery plans, backup validation, and break-glass access are exercised together. Without clear ownership, resilience becomes a document instead of an operating capability.
👉 Read our full editorial: Active Directory resilience gaps still expose identity recovery plans
