Identity is the new security perimeter. And with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) at the heart of Microsoft 365, Azure workloads, and thousands of SaaS integrations, protecting identity data has never been more critical.
In this field guide, we’ll walk through why Entra ID backup and recovery is essential in 2025, what Microsoft does (and doesn’t) provide, and how organisations and MSPs can reduce risk, improve compliance, and plan for fast recovery.
What is Microsoft Entra ID?
Microsoft Entra ID is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service, the modern evolution of Azure Active Directory. It authenticates users, manages groups and roles, enforces Conditional Access policies, registers applications, and stores critical logs that underpin both security and compliance.
From email and Teams to third-party SaaS and line-of-business apps, Entra ID is the single source of truth for identity. If it breaks, so does access to everything else.
What native backup does Microsoft provide?
Here’s the catch: Microsoft does not provide a native backup for Entra ID.
- Users and groups: Soft-deleted objects can be restored for up to 30 days.
- Most other objects: including Conditional Access policies, app registrations, and devices, are hard-deleted immediately when removed.
Once hard-deleted, they cannot be recovered. To confirm this, Microsoft’s own documentation states that deleted Azure AD resources are permanently removed after 30 days and that many objects do not support soft-delete at all.
This means that without third-party protection, a misclick, misconfiguration, or malicious insider can cause irreversible damage.
Common failure modes in Entra ID
Organisations often underestimate how fragile identity configurations can be. Common failure scenarios include:
- Accidental deletion of a user or group, cutting off access to critical apps.
- Misconfigured Conditional Access policy, locking out entire departments, or even admins.
- Malicious deletion of app registrations or service principals, breaking integrations.
- Expired logs that vanish before security or compliance teams can investigate incidents.
Each of these events can take hours or even days to manually rebuild, and in the meantime, business stops.
Why backup matters: RPO and RTO in identity
In data protection, two key metrics matter:
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data you can afford to lose. For Entra ID, this means how current your backups are.
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How fast you can get back up and running. For Entra ID, this means how quickly you can restore a user, policy, or configuration.
Without dedicated Entra ID backups, your RPO is effectively 30 days for users and zero for other objects. Your RTO depends on how long it takes to manually recreate policies, keys, and configurations, often measured in days.
Building recovery runbooks for Entra ID
Every IT team should have an Entra ID recovery runbook. At minimum, include:
- User restore: How to bring back a deleted user with group memberships and role assignments intact.
- Conditional Access rollback: Steps to undo a misconfigured policy that locks out users.
- App registration recovery: Restoring deleted or corrupted applications and service principals.
- Log retention: Ensuring audit and sign-in logs are available for investigations beyond Microsoft’s default retention periods.
With a backup solution like Redstor’s Microsoft Entra ID Backup, these runbooks become simple: select a snapshot, preview changes, and restore objects in minutes.
Compliance and regulatory mapping
Identity isn’t just an operational risk, it’s also a compliance requirement. Regulators expect organisations to retain logs, prove access controls, and demonstrate the ability to recover from failures.
Entra ID backup directly supports:
- ISO 27001 — Annex A.12.3: Backup and recovery of information.
- SOC 2 — Availability and Security principles requiring recovery capabilities.
- GDPR — Article 32: Ability to restore availability and access to personal data in a timely manner.
- HIPAA — Security Rule §164.308(a)(7): Contingency planning, including data backup and disaster recovery.
Without backups, proving compliance in an audit becomes far more difficult, especially if identity logs and policies can’t be restored.
Visualising object relationships
Entra ID is not flat, it’s a web of interconnected objects:
- Users belong to groups.
- Groups and users are assigned to roles.
- Conditional Access policies govern who can log in where.
- App registrations depend on service principals.
When one object disappears, the relationships break too. A true backup must understand and preserve these dependencies, otherwise restores are incomplete.
Next steps
Want to see how easy it is to recover deleted users, roles, or policies with Redstor?