Do You Have A Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Active Directory?

Do You Have A Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Active Directory?

Despite how critical Active Directory data is, a majority of organizations and businesses have failed to implement and test a disaster recovery plan for it. Is your active directory data backed up?

A recent survey conducted by Semperis has identified a dangerous trend in business continuity, which can be summed up by two contradictory facts:

• 97% of organizations agree that Active Directory is “mission-critical”
• More than half of these organizations either have not tested their Active Directory disaster recovery plan or have no plan in place whatsoever

The fact is that even though most businesses understand how important Active Directory is to their daily operations and overall business continuity, very few of them have taken the appropriate steps to protect it.

Have you?

Why Is Active Directory So Important?

In a nutshell, Active Directory dictates how your users interact with your organization’s domain. It’s Microsoft’s proprietary directory service that stores and tracks vital information including permissions and access rights as determined by your administrator.

If your Active Directory were to go down, or if a cybercriminal were to breach it, it would put your entire business at risk. Authorizations and permissions would be disabled, and external parties could make dangerous changes to user rights.

The bottom line is that it’s a critical part of your cybersecurity processes, and it needs to be protected.

Do You Have An Active Directory Disaster Recovery Plan In Place?

If you’re going to protect your Active Directory, your disaster recovery plan should include the following:

• Minimize Your Attack Surface: Limit the potential of a breach by carefully controlling administrator accounts and who has access to them.
• Monitor And Control Changes: Your Active Directory needs to be monitored to keep an eye out for signs that it has been breached. Unauthorized changes to permissions or the creation of new accounts can tip you off that someone has illegally accessed your Active Directory.
• Robust And Tested Data Backups: In the event of a large-scale compromise, you need to be able to fall back on a recent data backup of your entire Active Directory. Make sure these backups occur often and are tested on a regular basis.

If you’re not sure where to begin in developing and implementing a disaster recovery plan, GO Concepts provides expert guidance as part of its IT for DD services.

GO Concepts Protects Clients’ Active Directories

As a part of our standard business continuity and disaster recovery services, GO Concepts protects clients against immediate downtime during an Active Directory outage by carefully configuring our GO Private Cloud virtual private servers (VPS) and networks located in our secure, on-premise datacenter. Thanks to DNS proxying, an Active Directory outage would only delay new changes to the directory, so our clients can continue working without any major disruptions.

We also implement the following controls and safeguards for our clients:

• Server-wide backups that can be restored in hours thanks to virtual server clusters with local and cloud-based backups.
• Tiered administrative roles combined with encrypted and Multi-factor Authentication-enabled admin workstations
• Remote Management tools that scan and maintain secure settings

These processes allow us to fully restore a client’s Active Directory in the event of an outage, all without any major disruption on their end. They can continue working while we manage the restoration.

Need Expert Assistance With Your Active Directory Disaster Recovery Planning?

You can’t afford to let anything threaten your Active Directory — it’s too critical to your security and productivity.

Allow GO Concepts to help. Get in touch with our team to discover how we manage Active Directory disaster recovery planning and ensure your team can do what it needs to.  Whether Full Managed or Co-Managed, the GO Concepts IT for DD service offers a complete solution for your Ohio DD-related organization, business, or not-for-profit.  Call us today!