In my previous two posts in this series, I made the case for why you need a solid Active Directory disaster recovery plan. The dramatic increase in COVID-19-related malware attacks around the world makes this need even more urgent — IT staff are being pulled away from critical cybersecurity tasks just as the increase in remote workers dramatically expands your attack surface area. The best way to contain the costs of mistakes and attacks alike is to ensure that you can restore your data and systems quickly.
That means having a comprehensive and flexible disaster recovery tool that automates as much as possible. Native tools and procedures are time consuming and error prone even in the best of times, and most third-party disaster recovery solutions are rigid and limited. Where can you turn for help?
Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory
Quest is the Active Directory expert and a trusted partner for organizations of all sizes around the globe. We understand that AD recovery isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. You need a solution that respects your particular priorities, including which data and applications are most critical, as well as the unique conditions of a given disaster scenario, such as which data centers or regions are impacted and how much damage was done.
Recovery Manager for Active Directory (RMAD) delivers that power and flexibility. For smaller Active Directory recovery jobs, Recovery Manager provides easy-to-read reports that help you pinpoint the changes you need to revert to remediate an issue. With that intelligence, you can granularly recover individual AD objects, including users, groups, computers, organizational units, sites, subnets and Exchange storage groups. Similarly, you can restore individual attributes, such as account settings, group memberships and binary attributes, even if the object itself has not been deleted. You can even quickly restore individual GPOs, along with Group Policy links and permission settings. Even better, you can perform any of these restores without having to restart your domain controllers.
For full-on disasters, Recovery Manager automates both domain-level recovery and forest recovery, saving enormous amounts of time while eliminating the risk of human error. In fact, the automated recovery functionality can reduce the time to recover from forest-level AD corruption by up to 95 percent. Moreover, Recovery Manager gives you options for how you want to recover, including both bare metal recovery (BMR) and restoring to a clean OS. Moreover, you can restore to physical on-prem servers, VMs or IaaS resources. Recovery Manager even enables you to validate your disaster recovery plan by building a separate virtual forest test lab populated with production data where you can safely test and practice various disaster scenarios.
For a complete hybrid recovery solution, simply integrate Recovery Manager with On Demand Recovery. On Demand Recovery enables you to back up and restore cloud-only attributes for hybrid objects, such as membership in cloud-only groups, application role assignments, Office license type and Azure application custom attributes. You’ll have a single recovery dashboard for both hybrid and cloud-only objects — giving you peace of mind.
