Best Practices for Active Directory Backup

Ransomware makes total AD meltdown realistic, but recovery practice has barely changed in 15 years; DXC's Guido Grillenmeier lists AD recovery dos and don'ts—from detailed plans to offline backups.

Semperis argues that testing backups under ideal conditions creates only an illusion of resilience; real cyber resilience is about staying recoverable when the plan fails and the assumptions behind it collapse.

Ex-bp CISO Simon Hodgkinson argues disaster recovery is too narrow for today's threats: operational resilience must span governance, business continuity, and third-party supplier risk.

Explains why hypervisor snapshots of domain controllers can't replace proper AD backups: restores risk lingering objects, replication inconsistency, and USN rollback during forest recovery.

Former bp CISO Simon Hodgkinson on the HIP Podcast: operational resilience is broader than disaster recovery—spanning governance, business continuity and cyber risk—plus lessons from the $1M Colonial Pipeline fine.

A practical look at the ROI of fast AD recovery: quantifying lost operations while AD is down (Baltimore's $18M hit), why ransomware crews target AD objects—group accounts, GPOs, SYSVOL, DCs—and why continuity plans must cover AD.