Most organizations know they should test their Active Directory and Entra ID recovery plans. Few do.
Attackers aren’t waiting for organizations to catch up. Non-human and agentic identities already outnumber human identities 109 to 1, and up to 60% of them sit dormant while still holding live access to critical assets.
Most organizations lack the time and specialized identity recovery skills to build and maintain recovery readiness in-house. Quest Guardian Managed Recovery is the first offering in the new Quest Guardian managed services portfolio, and it gives organizations access to Quest’s Active Directory and Entra ID recovery expertise as an ongoing subscription. It’s part of a broader expansion of the Quest Security Management Platform, which also introduces Secure Replay for AI-guided recovery to the last safe point, alongside new updates across identity visibility and protection.
What the service includes
Quest Guardian Managed Recovery is built on Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition (RMAD DRE) and Quest Identity Security, configured by a team with more than 25 years of Active Directory recovery experience. The subscription covers the full readiness lifecycle:
- Baseline design, deployment, and validation – Quest architects and implements a recovery platform tailored to the organization’s business continuity requirements.
- Monthly recovery health checks – Quest professionals review AD scope, backup health, and recovery settings each month, then deliver a summary of findings and changes.
- Two disaster recovery simulations a year – Simulations test readiness against real outage scenarios and keep the recovery response plan current.
- An annual tabletop exercise – With the full client team involved, the exercise surfaces process and coordination issues before they surface during an incident, and produces an after-action report the team can act on.
- Critical incident response – If a qualified incident happens during the subscription period, Quest guides the organization through its Active Directory forest restoration effort.
- Hybrid identity coverage – Protection isn’t limited to on-premises AD. The subscription includes Identity Recovery for Entra ID, so hybrid and cloud-only identities are covered under one plan, backed by SaaS recovery and immutable storage.
A new recurring revenue stream for partners
Quest Guardian Managed Recovery is also available as a fully managed, white-label service that partners can deliver under their own brand. It lets partners put their brand on a proven, packaged managed service that turns identity resilience into a new stream of partner-sourced recurring revenue, deeper relationships with the customers partners already own, and a resilience offering built for today’s identity-driven attacks – where an Active Directory or Entra ID outage can cost from $730K to millions per hour.
For partners, that adds up to:
- Fast time to market with a branded managed service built on proven Quest technology and delivery, instead of investing to build identity recovery expertise from scratch
- Recurring, services-led revenue that extends well beyond one-time project work and compounds across the customer base
- Resilience led by tested recovery readiness — a capability most customers know they need but few have in place
- Deepened and expanded existing accounts with an ongoing subscription to relationships that partners already own
- Alignment with Microsoft go-to-market motions across Active Directory and Entra ID security
This model is already proven in the field. A global systems integrator delivers Quest Active Directory recovery as a managed service to a multinational oil and petrochemical producer, keeping the energy company’s identity environment continuously recoverable. Accidentally deleted AD objects and attributes are restored without downtime, and the customer passes its annual AD recovery audits every year, protecting the reputation of both the customer and the partner.
Recovery you don’t have to manage alone
Recovery plans that live in a document and never get tested tend to fail right when they’re needed. Regular health checks and tabletop exercises turn a static plan into a living one, with vulnerabilities found and fixed before an incident occurs. And because Quest is involved throughout the subscription, organizations get an experienced team on the call the moment a recovery is underway.
For organizations without the headcount or specialized skills to run this in-house, Quest Guardian Managed Recovery delivers the same recovery capabilities that make Quest a market leader on speed and clean recovery, without requiring a dedicated internal team to operate them.
