Is Microsoft Entra ID Missing From Your Backup Strategy?

Article by: Harry Longdon, Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Entra ID is a fundamental part of modern IT Infrastructure. Its role is far beyond Microsoft 365, underpinning identity, authentication and access and extends beyond the Microsoft ecosystem. The threat landscape has changed significantly, with ransomware, cyber-attacks, and an ever-growing reliance on cloud services has pushed resilience and recovery to the top of the list for most IT teams. As such, approaches such as the 3-2-1-1-0 rule have become critical to how organisations protect their data and, by extension, their business and their livelihoods. But the data shows there is still a gap for many that is surprisingly easy to overlook: Entra ID.

Why Backing Up Entra ID really matters.

Entra underpins everything. It contains critical objects and configuration that determine who has access, what they can access and how that access is controlled. This includes:

• Users & Groups

• Administrative units & Roles

• Conditional Access Policies

• Applications and Service Principals

• InTune policies

• Sign-in Logs

• BitLocker recovery keys

The above list demonstrates that if compromised, incorrectly configured or if critical objects are deleted, it can lead to immediate and far-reaching consequences. Your team could lose access to essential applications and services, and understanding why and how to restore service can sometimes be a challenge.

With HybrIT Protect for Entra ID, organisations can protect their Entra ID tenant and restore service as quickly as possible. Without a suitable backup capability, recovering from an identity-related incident can be a complex process. Consider that the challenge isn’t simply restoring access, but IT managers also need to understand what changed and return the critical identity configuration to a known, trusted state.

Microsoft will protect you for 7 days.

Microsoft do an excellent job of maintaining a highly available platform, and they even provide a ‘failsafe’ backup option, which you can read about here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/backup/overview

Unfortunately, 7 days may not be enough in many cases. Additionally, this backup will still be stored within the Microsoft ecosystem and associated with your tenant, which will limit recovery options.

HybrIT Protect for Entra ID

HybrIT’s data protection platform is built around immutability as standard. If you choose to explore Entra ID protection with us to complement your existing disaster recovery suite, you will protect the areas below:

Area protected What is protected

Users User accounts and properties

Groups Groups and their properties

Administrative units Administrative units and properties

Roles Entra ID roles and properties

Conditional Access Conditional Access policies

Applications Entra ID applications and their configuration

Service principals Service principal objects and properties

Microsoft Intune policies Intune policy configuration

Devices Microsoft Entra ID device objects

BitLocker recovery keys BitLocker recovery key information

Audit logs Microsoft Entra ID audit logs

Sign-in logs Microsoft Entra ID sign-in logs

Speak to HybrIT today

If your Entra ID is not currently protected, act now. A conversation with one of the HybrIT experts can quickly assess risk and put the right protection in place.

If Microsoft 365 backup is already in place, but Entra ID is not, this is a simple add-on that can be initiated very quickly. There is no need to redesign the solution and no long lead times.

If you would just like to speak to our security team, get in touch with us.