Just a reminder for all you Blackbird Auditor users: to recover from accidental changes and deletions, simply find the event with the interactive console and click “Rollback.”

• 1. Rapid installation and minimal training with no reliance on native auditing tools
• 2. Unmatched scalability and performance (“Our typical traffic volume is more than 1.5 million events per day and Blackbird has scaled-up effortlessly,” Josh Munn, Senior Systems Administrator, The University of Mississippi Medical Center)
• 3. Real-time collection and alerting for active directory and group policy changes
• 4. Centralized audit analysis and reporting with role based access control
• 5. Fully contextualized auditing views (Shows results in plain English, including before-and-after states of every event)
• 6. A Rollback button to undo changes
• 7. Granular searching and reporting at the attribute level
• 8. Complete security and compliance library with support for custom reports
• 9. Seamless integration into native tools and other Blackbird solutions
• 10. Report scheduling and automated delivery

When active directory goes down, everyone notices. Users cannot log in, applications become unusable and organizations lose money. Let’s face it, even without malicious events, people still make mistakes. Although recovering from directory outages can be streamlined with point in time and continuous recovery solutions such as Blackbird Recovery, it’s always less expensive to prevent the outage in the first place.

The growth of the cloud, virtualization and the consumerization of IT continue to provide companies and end users with more flexibility. However, they also raise some challenges for IT departments. One such challenge that is commonly discussed is data loss prevention (DLP), or the ability to identify, monitor and protect sensitive corporate information.

Microsoft has included recovery capabilities with every release Active Directory (AD) from Windows Server 2000 on. There is a saying that has been around in IT for a long time, “An administrator is only as good as their last backup”. This is because accidental deletions of a single user object to the removal of hundreds even thousands of objects from deleting an organizational Unit (OU) are still a common occurrence. The increasing use of identity management systems and the use of scripting to automate administration tasks have also increased the risk of populating the directory with bad data. This may lead to applications not function correctly or even have security and regulatory compliance implications.

Hi my name is Morgan Holm and I am the director of product management for the Blackbird Group. For my first blog post I will focus on a hot button topic for many of our customers and prospects, data governance. A significant portion of the data held by many organizations is in the form of unstructured data in files. There has been explosive growth in the amount of data organizations need to retain largely driven by regulatory compliance. One of our customers has over 2 petabytes worth of data today and as they continue to acquire other organizations, this amount will only increase going forward. This post will focus on some of the challenges that data stored in files poses to data governance initiatives.

While Blackbird has provided audit and recovery solutions for Active Directory for years, we are now seeing an increase in customer inquiries about Privilege Identity Management (PIM) challenges. This growing demand continues to be driven by security and compliance concerns and the need to prevent internal data breaches through the use of privileged accounts.

In my first blog post I talked about proving and maintaining compliance for data governance rules defined for file system resources in the enterprise. This post will continue the discussion of data governance, reviewing some of the reasons organizations are implementing these policies and processes as well as the main challenges associated defining the rules for file system resources.

Data Governnance - Why and How?

I remember back in school working on an essay for days, saving it to my local 5 ¼ inch floppy just to find a disk error when trying to print it the day before it was due. Remembering all that I wrote, and then actually doing the work, gave me an unsettling feeling in my lower stomach. I am sure we have all been there. Well, having more than a decade of experience with Active Directory I can tell you I have come across a fair share of administrators who have come across a similar scenario.

Have you ever needed to undelete or rollback a GPO, but realized you forgot to back it up or could not remember what changes were made to it? Well, we have had many customers with the same problem. That’s why Blackbird Recovery for Active Directory also supports group policy objects (GPO). When group policies are deleted or changed, Blackbird captures the changes and versions the GPO behind the scenes—so you don’t have to. You can then use the native GPMC interface to recover (with the GPOLNKS), rollback and compare GPO versions.

Blackbird for AD also supports AD integration, DNS and ADLDS/ADAM as well. So you get the maximum coverage from a single solution.