The New Cyber Frontier: Securing Your Digital Identity Core

LOS ANGELES, CA – September 14, 2026 – In the intricate digital ecosystems that power modern enterprises, the concept of a secure perimeter has irrevocably shifted. It is no longer a fortified network wall but a complex web of user identities. Recognizing this, cloud backup provider IDrive today announced a significant expansion of its services, adding backup and recovery for Microsoft Entra ID, the identity and access management backbone for millions of organizations using Microsoft 365.

This move is more than just a new product feature; it’s a direct response to a burgeoning threat landscape where the keys to the kingdom—digital identities—are the prime target. For organizations, Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) acts as the central control plane, governing who can access what, from where, and how. The loss or compromise of this critical infrastructure, whether through a sophisticated cyberattack, insider error, or simple misconfiguration, can be catastrophic, effectively locking an organization out of its own digital environment and grinding operations to a halt.

IDrive's new offering aims to create a vital safety net for this identity core, promising rapid recovery for the users, groups, applications, and policies that define an organization's operational and security posture. The announcement signals a maturing market awareness: protecting data is not enough; we must also protect the very system that grants access to it.

The Identity Layer: An Overlooked Battleground

For years, cybersecurity strategies have focused on protecting endpoints, networks, and data at rest. However, attackers have adapted, realizing that compromising a single privileged identity can be far more efficient than breaching a firewall. This has turned identity infrastructure into a primary battleground. According to industry analysts, misconfigurations in cloud identity platforms now represent the number one risk, often creating unintended pathways for attackers.

This is where the shared responsibility model in the cloud becomes critically important. While Microsoft ensures the uptime and security of the Entra ID service, the organization is responsible for securing the data and configurations within it. Native tools offered by platform providers often have limitations, creating a dangerous resilience gap. For instance, the standard Entra ID Recycle Bin retains deleted users, groups, and applications for only 30 days and fails to cover more complex configurations like Conditional Access Policies or role assignments, which are frequent targets for manipulation.

This gap is precisely what third-party solutions are rushing to fill. The strategic imperative is clear and growing. Leading research firms like Gartner predict that by 2028, 75% of enterprises will treat SaaS backup as mission-critical, a dramatic rise from just 15% in 2024. This shift is driven by the stark reality of identity-led attacks and tightening regulatory pressures. Protecting the identity layer is no longer a niche concern for the highly regulated but a fundamental component of cyber resilience for any modern organization.

Bridging the Resilience Gap Beyond Native Tools

While Microsoft has recently introduced its own native Entra ID backup solution, currently in public preview, it underscores the very problem it aims to solve. This new native feature offers daily backups but with a retention history of only seven days, a window that may be insufficient for forensic investigation or for recovering from a slow-burning, undetected compromise. Furthermore, as a preview feature, it lacks the production-grade assurance many enterprises require for mission-critical recovery.

IDrive’s Microsoft Entra ID Backup is designed to bridge these specific gaps. By providing automated, frequent snapshots of a wide array of objects—including users, groups, roles, app registrations, device configurations, and crucial policies—it offers a much more comprehensive safety net. The service promises point-in-time recovery, allowing an administrator to restore the identity environment to a known-good state from before a malicious or accidental change occurred.

Key capabilities like change tracking provide administrators with visibility into what was altered, when, and by whom, which is invaluable for both troubleshooting and security audits. The ability to perform granular restores of a single user or a specific policy, or bulk recovery of multiple objects while preserving their intricate relationships, addresses the time-consuming and error-prone nature of manual reconstruction. Storing this sensitive data with AES-256 encryption in an independent cloud provides an essential 'air gap,' insulating the backups from an attack that might compromise the live production environment.

A Unified Front for M365 Protection

The strategic value of IDrive’s approach lies in its integration. By adding Entra ID to its existing Microsoft 365 Backup suite—which already covers OneDrive, Outlook, SharePoint, and Teams—the company offers a single pane of glass for protecting the full spectrum of an organization's M365 environment. This unified management console simplifies operations, reduces vendor sprawl, and empowers IT teams to manage both data and identity protection from one centralized platform.

"Microsoft Entra ID is fundamental to how organizations manage identities and access to their digital environments," said Raghu Kulkarni, CEO of IDrive, in the official announcement. "With Microsoft Entra ID Backup, IDrive is extending comprehensive Microsoft 365 data protection to the identity layer, helping organizations maintain business continuity and quickly recover from accidental or malicious changes."

This move places IDrive alongside other major data protection vendors like Veeam, Rubrik, and AvePoint, which are also aggressively expanding into identity protection. The trend indicates a broad industry consensus that identity infrastructure can no longer be treated as a separate, self-healing entity. Its protection must be integrated into an organization's overall data resilience strategy. For IT managers and CIOs, this unified approach promises not just enhanced security, but also greater operational efficiency and reduced complexity.

The Strategic Value: Resilience, Compliance, and Cost

Beyond the technical features, the strategic implications for organizations are profound. At a price point of $10 per Entra ID seat per year with unlimited storage, IDrive is making enterprise-grade identity resilience accessible to a broader market. This straightforward pricing model removes the barrier of complex storage calculations and allows for predictable budgeting.

In practical terms, this capability provides a powerful defense against a range of real-world scenarios. It allows for swift recovery from an administrator's accidental deletion of a critical user group, the remediation of a misconfigured policy that has locked thousands of users out of their applications, or the restoration of a clean identity state following a ransomware attack that targeted user roles and permissions.

Furthermore, robust identity backup is becoming increasingly critical for regulatory compliance. Frameworks like NIST, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA all mandate, directly or indirectly, that organizations must be able to restore access to data and ensure the integrity of their systems following an incident. Demonstrating the ability to recover the core identity system is a powerful way to meet these obligations. In an era where a single identity compromise can lead to a multi-million dollar data breach, investing in a dedicated backup solution for the identity layer is evolving from a best practice into a fundamental pillar of modern cyber strategy.