How to Ensure Effective Backup for Your Crown Jewels (a.k.a. Your Identity)

If a Conditional Access policy locked out every admin tomorrow, could we restore yesterday’s state in under an hour?

If you’ve ever lived in Australia, you know cockatoos. Loud. Smart. Destructive. Perfectly capable of dismantling something you assumed was solid, expensive, and definitely not edible. At my children’s school, the Cocky’s have found ways to bypass many controls to gorge on the food within the lunchbox within the schoolbag within the bag rack – if it wasn’t so frustrating I’d be impressed!

Now imagine that same cocky is a misconfiguration, an overenthusiastic script, or a compromised admin account – and the lunch is your Microsoft Entra ID tenant. Suddenly the squawking gets very real.

Identity is no longer simply “the thing that lets users log in”. In a modern Microsoft environment, Entra ID is the control plane. It decides who gets access, from where, on what device, under what conditions, and after how many MFA prompts. Lose that, and you don’t just have an IT incident: you’ve got a business outage with a generous side of reputation harm.

Yet surprisingly, identity backup is still something many organisations treat like a pot plant: nice to have, but not essential. Until the cocky shows up.

Identity Is the Crown Jewels, Whether You Like It or Not

We’ve spent years backing up servers, databases, mailboxes, and endpoints. Identity? That’s often assumed to be “Microsoft’s problem”.

It isn’t.

Microsoft does a solid job of keeping the platform running. But the configuration, policies, role allocations, conditional access rules, enterprise apps, and trust relationships? That’s on you.

If Entra ID is all of these things:

• The front door to Microsoft 365
• The gatekeeper for SaaS apps
• The policy engine for Zero Trust
• The decision-maker for device trust

…then not backing it up is a bit like leaving the keys to the pub on the bar overnight and relying on chance.

“But There’s a Recycle Bin, Right?”

Yes. And no.

Entra ID has some native restoration capabilities. Users and groups might hang around for a short while if deleted. Some things can be restored. Some can’t.

Here’s the catch: The most dangerous failures aren’t always deletions.

They’re misconfigurations.

• A broken Conditional Access policy can lock out users (or even admins).
• A change to app permissions can silently change overprivileged access.
• A rushed security tweak might stop your business dead at 9:01am Monday.

And unlike a deleted file, you can’t just click “restore previous version” and go back to yesterday.

That’s when people realise the cocky didn’t just eat the sandwich: it ate all of your lunch.

So, what’s an effective Identity backup?

Effective Entra ID backup isn’t just for ticking a compliance box. It’s about being able to answer one very uncomfortable question:

“Can we get back to a known-good identity state if everything goes pear-shaped?”

In practical terms, that means:

1. Knowing What You’ve Got

You can’t protect what you can’t see. Identity environments grow organically and FAST – apps get added, policies evolve, exceptions pile up. A backup gives you a historical record of what changed and when.

2. Capturing Configuration, Not Only Objects

Backing up users alone won’t save you. The real value is in policies, roles, app registrations, conditional access, and the relationships between them.

3. Being Able to Roll Back, and quickly

When something breaks, speed matters. Manually recreating identity configuration under pressure is how mistakes compound. Recovery needs to be predictable, repeatable, and calm – even when the incident isn’t.

4. Treating Identity Like Production Infrastructure

You test restores for servers. You test DR for workloads. Identity deserves the same respect. If you’ve never tested recovery, you don’t have a backup, you have a hope.

Why Identity Incidents Hurt More Than You Expect

The brutal truth is that identity failures are uniquely painful because they cut across everything.

When Entra ID is unhealthy:

• Users can’t authenticate
• Admins may be locked out
• Security controls stop working as designed
• Apps fail in confusing, cascading ways

And unlike a server outage, there’s often no single red light flashing. Things just… don’t work. Support tickets flood in. Execs ask hard questions. Someone inevitably says, “How did this get past change control?”

That’s when the cocky looks at you, tips its head, and squawks.

The Takeaway: Don’t Let a Bird Eat ALL your lunch

You don’t need to panic. And you don’t need to overengineer it. But you do need to acknowledge reality:

Identity is now your most critical asset.
And critical assets deserve proper backup and recovery.

If you wouldn’t run your business without backing up data, don’t run it without backing up identity.

Because when the cocky turns up – and it will – you’ll want more than an empty lunchbox and a story that starts with:

“Well… we assumed Entra ID just looked after itself.”

And nobody cares to explain that in a post-incident review.

By Rodd “RoddyJ” Jefferson