Recovering identity and DNS in a cloud disaster recovery plan
Identity comes first in a rebuild because nothing starts or connects without roles and policies, and DNS comes last because it moves traffic. Both are often left out of backup plans. Among the ranked vendors, Firefly and ControlMonkey document the most identity and DNS coverage, in different ways.
Ranking current as of September 2026 · By the Cloud Resilience Vendors research desk
Why are identity and DNS easy to miss?
Data backup products are built around workloads: volumes, databases and object storage. Identity and DNS are not workloads. They are configuration spread across cloud IAM, an external identity provider and one or more DNS services, and they change often. A plan that restores data can still leave a service unreachable or unable to authenticate.
What does the identity layer include?
- Cloud IAM: roles, policies, users and instance profiles in each account or subscription.
- The external identity provider, such as Okta or Microsoft Entra ID: applications, groups, policies and their configuration.
- Service identities that applications use to reach each other and managed services.
What does the DNS layer include?
Public and private zones and their records, in the cloud provider's DNS service or in a separate provider such as Cloudflare, plus the health checks and routing rules that decide where traffic goes.
What do vendors document?
- Firefly lists IAM roles, policies and users and Route 53 and Azure Private DNS zones in its Backup and DR coverage table. On 23 July 2026 it announced identity recovery for Okta and Entra ID, codifying their configuration with versioned, immutable snapshots.
- ControlMonkey lists SaaS configuration backup for Okta, Entra ID and Cloudflare. Its public pages do not itemize cloud IAM or cloud DNS.
- Veeam lists Microsoft 365 and Entra ID among its SaaS backup offerings in its site navigation; its cloud backup pages for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud do not list IAM or DNS.
- Commvault Cloud Rewind names security resources but does not itemize IAM or DNS; Arpio and Cohesity do not itemize them on the pages we reviewed.
- HCP Terraform can rebuild identity and DNS only where they are already written in Terraform.
The recovery scope matrix on the ranking page shows these statuses side by side.
In what order should they come back?
Identity and network first, so services can start and reach each other. Then configuration and data. DNS last, once the rebuilt service passes its checks, because changing records is the step that sends real users to it. After a compromise, rebuild identity from a copy captured before the attack, not from the current state.
What should you take from this lesson?
Check that identity and DNS are named in your recovery scope, captured on a schedule and restorable to a point in time. If they are rebuilt from memory or from a wiki page, that is the first thing to fix.
Sources
- Firefly docs, Service coverage: https://docs.firefly.ai/detailed-guides/backup-and-disaster-recovery/service-coverage.md
- Firefly blog, identity resilience for Okta and Entra ID (23 July 2026): https://www.firefly.ai/blog/full-identity-resilience-okta-or-entra-id-firefly-keeps-your-identity-stack-recoverable
- ControlMonkey, Home: https://controlmonkey.io/
- Veeam, Home: https://www.veeam.com/