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09/07/2026 5:53 pm
TL;DR: Cyberattacks and outages increasingly force organisations to recover not just data but applications, cloud infrastructure, and directory services, according to Commvault. That shifts resilience from backup coverage to restoration of identity-dependent systems, immutable copies, and repeatable recovery paths.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Commvault: cyber resilience and recovery capabilities for cloud apps, Active Directory, and AI workloads
By the numbers:
- 10x faster., ays its Cloud Rewind approach can bring back business 10x faster.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when backup recovery does not include identity services and cloud configuration?
A: Backup-only recovery can restore files while leaving the environment unusable.
Q: Why do IAM and NHI teams need to care about disaster recovery planning?
A: Because identity controls are part of service continuity.
Q: How do organisations know whether their recovery capability is actually working?
A: They test whether critical services can be restored in the correct order, into a clean environment, with verified identity and configuration intact.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory recovery-critical identity dependencies Identify the directory services, workload identity layers, cloud control plane components, and configuration stores required before business services can resume.
- Test forest-level directory restoration Run recovery exercises for Active Directory and any federated identity services to measure how long authentication, authorization, and downstream app access remain unavailable.
- Validate clean-room restore paths Restore representative workloads into an isolated recovery environment and confirm the data, permissions, and configuration are free from persistence or corruption before reconnecting to production.
What's in the full article
Commvault's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Cloud Rewind recovery flow details for rebuilding cloud applications and infrastructure from a clean point in time
- Active Directory recovery workflow specifics, including custom runbook generation and point-and-click restoration steps
- AI workload recovery handling for large object sets and S3-based data lakes
- Air-gapped immutable storage and clean-room recovery options across multiple cloud destinations
👉 Read Commvault's analysis of cloud recovery, Active Directory, and AI workload resilience →
Cyber resilience and cloud recovery: are identity dependencies covered?
Explore further
09/07/2026 5:54 pm
Recovery is now an identity governance problem, not a storage problem. When cloud applications, directory services, and workload configuration all need to come back together, the restoration sequence becomes part of access governance. Backup-only thinking leaves a gap between preserved data and usable identity services. Practitioners should treat recovery readiness as a control plane concern, not an archival one.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 91% of former employee tokens remain active after offboarding, leaving organisations vulnerable to potential security breaches, according to The 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity.
- 62% of all secrets are duplicated and stored in multiple locations, causing unnecessary redundancy and increasing the risk of accidental exposure.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between data backup and operational recovery?
A: Data backup preserves information. Operational recovery restores the working environment that uses that information, including identity services, permissions, application dependencies, and platform configuration. Without the second layer, the first layer may be intact but still unavailable for business use.
👉 Read our full editorial: Cyber resilience now depends on recovery of identities and apps
