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09/07/2026 3:22 pm
TL;DR: Identity systems like Active Directory, Entra ID, and Okta are now a business control plane, and Commvault says exposure scoring, real-time identity auditing, rollback, and clean forest recovery are meant to reduce the blast radius of compromise. The governance lesson is that identity recovery has to be treated as a distinct programme, not a backup afterthought.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Commvault: Identity infrastructure resilience and recovery
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce the impact of identity infrastructure compromise?
A: They should treat directory services as a resilience priority and build controls around exposure discovery, live change auditing, and recovery orchestration.
Q: What breaks when identity systems contain stale or non-expiring credentials?
A: Stale or non-expiring credentials create durable access paths that attackers can rely on for persistence.
Q: How do teams know if identity auditing is actually helping?
A: Identity auditing is helping when it can show the full sequence of changes tied to a suspicious account, including the who, when, where, and before-and-after values.
Practitioner guidance
- Map directory exposure indicators to named remediation owners Inventory the specific identity misconfigurations that create persistence risk, assign each to a control owner, and track closure by account or setting rather than by generic risk theme.
- Instrument real-time identity change review Send directory change events into a workflow that can flag backdoor users, privilege grants, and policy object changes as a linked sequence, not as separate low-priority alerts.
- Test clean recovery on uncompromised infrastructure Validate that domain controller recovery rebuilds on clean operating systems and does not reuse potentially compromised virtual machines or templates.
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 vulnerability assessment, including the specific exposure indicators surfaced in AD.
- The real-time audit workflow for tracing who changed what, where, and in what order across identity systems.
- The one-click rollback and forest recovery sequence that restores identity services after malicious change.
- The clean OS recovery approach that rebuilds domain controllers on fresh infrastructure instead of reusing compromised systems.
👉 Read Commvault's analysis of identity resilience, auditing, and forest recovery →
Identity infrastructure resilience: what IAM teams are missing?
Explore further
09/07/2026 3:41 pm
Identity infrastructure has become a resilience domain, not just an access domain. Directory services now sit at the centre of authentication, privilege change, and operational continuity. When that layer is compromised, the incident is no longer confined to data exposure because the organisation may lose the ability to trust its own access decisions. Practitioners should treat identity infrastructure as critical recovery architecture, not supporting plumbing.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average estimated time to remediate a leaked secret is 27 days, despite 75% of organisations expressing strong confidence in their secrets management capabilities, according to The State of Secrets in AppSec.
- Only 44% of developers are reported to follow security best practices for secrets management, exposing a significant developer behaviour gap.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable for directory recovery after an identity compromise?
A: Accountability should sit with the identity, infrastructure, and resilience owners together because recovery is both a security and continuity problem. If the directory cannot be rebuilt cleanly, business services can remain untrusted even after the immediate incident is contained.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity infrastructure resilience is now a core security control
