ACTIVE DIRECTORY & DISASTER RECOVERY: LAYERS! ALWAYS LAYERS!
The following is our guideline for Greenfield but also the goal for Brownfield and side-by-side Active Directory and Disaster Recovery architecture.
DISASTER RECOVERY
First Layer: Volume Shadow Copies (Previous Versions)
Second Layer: Local Backup (BeyondCompare Hot Data)
Third Layer: Local Backup (Veeam Warm Data)
Fourth Layer: Local Archive File Sync (Warm Data)
Fifth Layer: Veeam Cloud Connect (Cold Data)* That Fifth Layer is Immutable for 30 days minimum.
NETWORK SEGMENTATION
There are several Active Directory layers to be considered here:
* UserVille - Production
* Infrastructure - Clusters, Servers, Roles, Server Apps
* Dev - All by themselves (1-Way Trust possible)
* DMZ - IIS, ARR/URLReWrite, Ubuntu, Server Apps
* IT PAW - All by themselves with 1-Way Trusts
IT management systems are set up as Privileged Access Workstations. Only management can be done from these systems.
JUMP SERVER
All Active Directory Forests/Domains should have a Jump Server setup in place. Group Policy settings should be defined to allow these servers to RDP, use Remote PowerShell, and RSAT management consoles.
If third party tools are required then these may need custom Windows Firewall settings in Group Policy along with exceptions for Software Restriction Policies.
UserVille (Production)
UserVille should be locked down to UserVille's subnet and the servers they are required to access for day to day work. That's it.
RECOVERY
What spurred this post? We had a cascade of backup destination failures that led to us needing to pull from BackBlaze onto a new backup destination. A recovery sync will then be run back to the systems that were being backed up to those locations.
The original systems themselves are fine. There's no current production data lost on them. But, what needs to be recovered is the business continuity data. The data that was sync'd then backed up then expunged from the local systems over time.
LESSON LEARNED
We will be tweaking the backup setup in this location to create a segment for the backup data that is outside the current structure.
Remember folks, Garbage in is Garbage out!
Happy Friday! :0)
*Repost I goofed on the original image. ;-)