OPINION
Enterprises need cyber resilience to ensure that they can sustain operations in the face of ransomware and other cyber threats, and a frequently underappreciated piece of cyber resilience is identity resilience. Identity resilience is a prerequisite to cyber resilience. While you might have a resilience plan for your data and apps, that doesn't matter if teams can't access their apps because your identity infrastructure is inaccessible.
Most practitioners are familiar with Active Directory (AD) resilience, given that adversaries frequently target AD to bring down operations. Many practitioners remember the Maersk NotPetya destructive malware incident in 2017 that wiped or rendered unusable nearly all of Maersk's AD domain controllers and interrupted global shipping and port operations. A single AD domain controller survived because a local office was disconnected from Maersk's network during the attack due to a power outage, and that lone AD survivor enabled Maersk to rebuild its global identity environment.
Given the potential for catastrophe, identity resilience is top of mind for identity teams and IT operations teams, particularly the business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) function. And the world is changing as identity infrastructure has progressed from on-premises AD to cloud-based identity providers (IdPs). The two teams need to collaborate, but they frequently view the problem through different lenses.