Explore the Importance of an Active Directory Recovery Plan
Understanding the Stakes of an Unprotected Active Directory
Active Directory Outage Impacts
Recent surveys have indicated:
- 90% use Active Directory as their primary authentication & authorization engine
- 79% have experienced a recent forest-wide outage
- 43% will take more than a day to recover their AD forest
- 90% are required to rebuild or have clean servers available to begin recovery
These survey results reveal an underlying problem with the potential for devastating impacts. A great example is the recent MGM cyberattack. Reports estimated the attack to cost over $100 million for the 10-day outage. Does this amount correctly reflect all of the costs associated with the outage?
With a bit of math, we can do a simple estimate of their loss from employee lost wages — potentially losing 13.5 million dollars per day. This only includes labor costs and doesn’t represent impacts to customers and suppliers, like loss of sales or damage to reputation. Considering all those factors, how much was MGM really losing per day? Last year, Veeam released a report where IT leaders estimated downtime costing $88,000 per hour.
When Active Directory is down, every minute matters! However, there are numerous scenarios that can prolong the recovery process. In your current Active Directory disaster recovery plan, are you required to rebuild servers from scratch or configure clean servers at the time of the attack? This can add extra time, stress, and potential complications to recovery. Considering the far-reaching impacts of outages, increasing cyberattacks, and costly downtime, is AD forest recovery that takes more than a day a viable option?

Hear from those who have experienced an Active Directory outage: Watch Video
Building a Robust Recovery Strategy
Backup Location
Clear Recovery Steps
When Active Directory issues arise, a clear plan can make all the difference:
- First, have a plan for common issues. If a Domain Controller goes down, what’s the first step? Craft action plans for frequent problems.
- Second, keep your plans updated. As your system and environment change, so should your recovery steps. Regularly review and update them.
- Third, practice makes perfect. Hold routine drills to familiarize your team with the plans. This ensures quicker, more confident responses in real situations.
- Last but not least, easy-to-find guides. Ensure that your team can quickly locate and refer to these plans, especially during emergencies.
Learn why Active Directory forest recovery is crucial to business continuity: View Infographic
RTO & RPO Compliance
Communication is Key
Understanding Network Topology
Incorporating Automation for Efficient Recovery
Get Proactive With Your AD Disaster Recovery with Cayosoft
With features like one-click immediate recovery, clean restore, advanced automation, and virtual labs, Cayosoft Guardian Forest Recovery was designed to do it all, very quickly, in a single solution.