Why Identity Resilience?

Most breaches today start with identity. For years the focus has been on preventing credential compromise through MFA, Conditional Access, PAM, and Zero Trust. But now attackers are shifting from “breaking in” to “logging in”, with a proliferation of attacks zooming in on your core identity systems.

Identity compromise can gain privileged access, disable security controls, lock other users out, disrupt operations and impact compliance. Your tenant configuration is business-critical data. If a malicious actor deleted your users, groups, application registrations and conditional access policies today, how long would your recovery take?

Microsoft’s entire environment depends on identity. Microsoft Entra ID controls access to users, applications, devices and data across your organisation. Most organisations have their prevention covered, but few have fully tested and resilient recovery. Discover how to close that gap with Autodata’s Managed Entra ID Backup to ensure your organisation’s identity resilience by enabling you to restore in seconds, even if a cyber threat is lurking, or a configuration error halts productivity.

You must protect your Entra ID

Entra ID is at the core of nearly every organisation and is essential to keep businesses running as it controls who has access to what. What Microsoft previously called Azure Active Directory has now become the primary target for cyber attacks making it the most important workload to protect.

As with other Microsoft products, Microsoft only takes responsibility for the availability of the service, not for the data held within it. I.T. teams remain entirely responsible for protecting and recovering their identity configuration and objects.

Autodata ensures your Entra ID tenant is fully resilient to meet your recovery objectives and compliance goals with our managed Entra ID backup and restoration for users, groups, application registers, and other objects:

Easily identify directory changes when restoring data
Reduce risk and stay compliant through automated backup processes
Pinpoint broken or missing application registrations
Successfully restore objects without Recycle Bins / beyond 30-day retention

Why do you need Entra ID Backup?

Because if you’re not backing up your Entra ID, you’re leaving yourself exposed to several operational and security risks:

Permanent loss of identity objects
Rebuilding security configurations by hand
Longer recovery after an attack
Crippling business disruption with employees unable to get back online
Compliance and audit challenges

MFA protects access.
Conditional Access protects sessions.
Identity security tools detect threats.

But when a privileged account is compromised and
your critical Entra ID objects get altered or deleted …
HOW QUICKLY CAN YOU RECOVER?

Autodata’s Managed Entra ID Backup

Accelerates Change Detection

Quickly identify changes and how they were created, whether by human error, threat actors, or automated attacks
Provides point-in-time copies of your IAM data should you need to conduct forensic investigations
Removes complexity so you can confidently revert or restore changes

Simplifies Governance, Risk and Compliance

Automated backups reduce human-error risks to ensure consistent resiliency practices
Access to audit logs allow you to only restore the data you need

Rapidly Restores Your Business

Precise identification of application registration changes mitigates damage
Object-level recovery means you choose what to restore
Bring your business back online in seconds with comprehensive recovery

Managed & Deployed for You

A secure backup service, offloading maintenance, updates and security fixes to the experts

Which Entra ID objects are protected?

USERS
GROUPS
ADMINISTRATIVE UNITS
ROLES
APPLICATIONS & SERVICE PRINCIPALS
POLICIES

All metadata including user and group metadata
Group memberships and ownerships
Entra ID Role assignments
Default and created roles
Assigned licences
Applications ownerships
Contacts
Conditional Access Policies
Intune Device Configurations

Discover Microsoft’s own anatomy of a real-world attack

[23 minute read]

READ ARTICLE

Storm-0501’s evolving techniques lead to cloud-based ransomware:

“The threat actor leveraged the Global Administrator Entra role privileges and the AADInternals tool to register a threat actor-owned Entra ID tenant as a trusted federated domain by the targeted tenant. To establish trust between the two tenants, a threat actor-generated root certificate is provided to the victim tenant, which in turn is used to allow authentication requests coming from the threat actor-owned tenant. The backdoor enabled Storm-0501 to craft security assertion markup language (SAML) tokens applicable to the victim tenant, impersonating users in the victim tenant while assuming the impersonated user’s Microsoft Entra roles.”

Frequently asked questions

What is identity resilience and why does it matter?

Identity resilience is an organisation’s ability to maintain trusted access and keep operating during an identity-based attack. It has become more pressing as credentials and tokens have replaced the network perimeter as the primary attack surface. Most breaches today involve identity compromise at some point in the attack chain.

How is identity resilience different from standard identity and access management?

Traditional IAM focuses on controlling who gets access. Identity resilience goes further: it assumes attackers will get in at some point and ensures the organisation can detect it, limit the damage, and recover access without losing control of critical systems.

What makes Microsoft Entra ID well-suited for identity resilience?

Entra ID combines phishing-resistant authentication, real-time risk detection, continuous access evaluation, just-in-time privilege management, and automated governance in a single platform. Few identity platforms offer that breadth across prevention, detection, and recovery.

What should we do first if we suspect an identity compromise?

Revoke all active sessions for the affected accounts, disable the compromised accounts without deleting them, activate break-glass accounts if administrative access is lost, and require all users to re-register MFA. Containment comes before investigation.

How do we know when our identity environment is fully recovered after an attack?

Recovery is complete when all attacker-created accounts have been removed, privileged role assignments match a pre-incident baseline, Conditional Access policies have been verified against a known-good export, all OAuth consent grants have been reviewed, and your SIEM log export is confirmed active.

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