Last week was the official commercial launch of Quest OnDemand Recovery for AD – a subscription-based automated service which protects your Active Directory for a small monthly fee.

Changes are good, and Active Directory – as the identity core of most companies’ IT – is always changes. However, sometimes wrong changes happen: accounts or whole containers can get accidentally deleted, or a script can go wild and wipe out a bunch of attributes across a set of accounts (I personally once got affected by such an incident a few years ago).

Quest OnDemand Recovery for AD works as a time machine for your Active Directory:

1. A small local agent in your network on the schedule you select detects changes in AD, compresses and encrypts them and sends them to a remote datacenter.
2. Whenever you need to roll back any change, you log on to the web site, browse and search your backups, pick the change you want to undo and click Restore.
3. The agents gets the changes back and applies them to the local AD.

Watch the quick video here:

There is a free 30 day trial of the service, after which you can keep using it for a small monthly fee (which when I am writing this is just 60 cents per AD user account per month).

You can learn more about this service and sign-up for it here.

Full disclosure: I am personally involved in Quest OnDemand efforts. And very excited about it, I must say.