The average downtime due to a ransomware attack is 21 days, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Why does it take so long to recover from a disaster? And how can you get back online faster?
Unfortunately, I’ve seen many organizations get stuck on the very first step — restoring Active Directory (AD).
For most organizations, Active Directory is mission critical. It’s the primary source for identity and access management to allow users to log on to your IT systems. When it’s down, all your employees are locked out. Work comes to a standstill, They can’t even begin to fix the damage caused by the attack.
It’s no wonder that Active Directory and its backups have become top targets for the bad guys. They can use AD to access your most valuable assets. The hackers also have a nasty habit of installing sneaky malware that leaves the door open to future attacks.
There’s no doubt that cyberattackers do their best to make AD recovery as complicated and time-consuming as possible. But it doesn’t have to be.
Adopting a proactive AD recovery solution reduces the time to regain login access from days or weeks to less than four hours. That’s a game changer in getting your business back up and running and minimizing the impact of an attack.
Let me show you how an automated solution will make a difference to your business.
Why you shouldn’t rely on a manual AD recovery process
Having worked in this business for many years, I can best describe the manual process for recovering Active Directory in one word: painful.
This process is lengthy, onerous, and prone to errors. Why? For starters, Microsoft’s technical guide on AD restoration outlines 18 major steps to recovery. Each one of them involves a complicated set of actions that must be synchronized across all domain controllers (DCs). Every keystroke and command must be correct and in the proper order for the process to work.
Sounds arduous? Wait, there’s more. After a catastrophic failure, you’ll likely have to acquire new hardware to host the recovered DCs. This involves the slow creation of a Windows recovery environment image for each system.
Another key factor is that you can’t start reconfiguring AD until at least one DC has been restored and has network connectivity. To prevent reinfection, the DC should remain isolated from the production network. As a result, administrators must manually configure the required networking and routing.
Remember that all this exacting work must get done in the pressure cooker environment of a total system failure, with anxious executives watching closely.
There’s much more to this story, but you get the idea. Experience has shown that it can take days or even weeks of manual effort to return AD to full function.
A proactive automated solution is the answer
By automating the complex AD process, you’ll be able to tell executives that login access will be restored in less than four hours after a disaster. That’s what Itergy’s AD Proactive Ransomware Recovery Solution does.
The solution uses a comprehensive approach to ensure a quick recovery to reduce the time and impact of an attack. This includes three components:
- Assessment and implementation. At this stage, our experts will assess your disaster recovery environment to uncover potential risks. The solution can be implemented in four weeks.
- Create and test backups. As a managed service, Itergy will create and routinely test AD backups for you. To protect them from hackers, the backups will be placed in external secure storage, independent of your operating system. This reduces the risk that backups may be infected or deleted.
- Recovery. In case of a disaster, Itergy’s automated solution quickly runs through all the steps to retrieve and verify the forest topology from the backup. We also supply an easy on-demand cloud environment for access to the restored backups. You don’t have to worry about network connectivity. Our experts will be on hand, so you don’t have to sweat the details.
There aren’t many guarantees in the world of cyber security. However, we’re so confident in our recovery solution that we provide a service level agreement guaranteeing that we’ll restore one AD forest in less than four hours.
What does that mean for your organization? That means you can get back into your systems right away to resume business. And it’s going to accelerate your full recovery from the attack, minimizing its potential impact on your revenue. Quite literally, it’s a guarantee you can take to the bank.
Contact us to talk about how Itergy’s AD Recovery Solution can help you.