Osterman Research

We attended RSAC 2024 in San Francisco from May 6-8. Our days at the conference were packed with back-to-back briefings. 

Here’s some notes on our briefing with Bob Bobel (CEO and founder) and Dmitry Sotnikov (Chief Product Officer) at Cayosoft. The briefing was organized by Jacob Manchester of Scratch Marketing + Media.

Our notes:

• Bob Bobel has a background in Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange, through stints at Quest, Dell, NetWrix, and others.
• Cayosoft offers tools for managing Active Directory and other Microsoft tools (e.g., Exchange, SharePoint, Teams). With many organizations moving to a hybrid / multi-cloud posture, tools for managing Active Directory are essential. Enterprises have felt left out as Microsoft diverted its attention to the cloud and cloud identity, e.g., Azure AD / Entra ID.
• To safeguard an Active Directory deployment, one of Cayosoft’s tools enables customers to create a daily snapshot of their AD forest for use if/when recovery is needed. This is created as a fully-functional standby AD forest in Azure. This is called Guardian Forest Recovery.
• If Active Directory is compromised by human error, technical malfunction, or a cyberattack, the latest snapshot of their AD forest enables fast recovery.
• Cayosoft talks about “instant” recovery. This seems to be 10-15 minutes, which while not “instant,” is MUCH faster than the multiple days or weeks it would otherwise take to recreate a corrupted or compromised AD without such tools.
• Guardian Forest Recovery also continually monitors for changes in AD / Azure AD. This visibility and oversight enables rollback of accidental and malicious changes.
• A customer using Cayosoft tools but not its AD forest recovery offering ran a proof-of-concept with the AD forest recovery solution but hadn’t decided whether to purchase the solution. A month later, something happened (it wasn’t a ransomware attack) which resulted in all group memberships for 5,000 employees being wiped out. Because the proof-of-concept was still running, they were able to use the standby AD forest in Azure to rollback all group memberships within an hour. And they signed up for ongoing use, too. 
• Guardian Forest Recovery is one of the solutions available from Cayosoft to add resiliency to Microsoft-centric identity environments. 

For more, see Cayosoft.