Entra ID

Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery Enters Preview

3 min read

Summary

Microsoft has launched Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery in public preview, giving organizations a Microsoft-managed way to restore critical identity objects and configurations to a known-good state. The service helps IT teams recover faster from accidental admin changes, provisioning errors, and malicious modifications that could otherwise disrupt access and security.

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Introduction

Identity failures can quickly become business outages. If a Conditional Access policy is misconfigured, user attributes are overwritten, or a privileged account makes unauthorized changes, IT teams need a fast way to investigate and recover. Microsoft is addressing that gap with Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery, now in public preview.

What’s new in Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery

Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery is an always-on, Microsoft-managed service designed to improve identity resilience inside the tenant, not just platform availability.

Key capabilities in preview

  • Automatic backups of critical Entra ID objects
  • Point-in-time visibility into configuration changes
  • Built-in safeguards that prevent backups from being disabled, deleted, or altered
  • Difference Reports to compare current settings with a previous backup
  • Targeted recovery jobs to restore only affected objects or configurations

Supported restore scope in public preview

Microsoft says the service can restore one backup per day within the last five days for core directory objects, including:

  • Users
  • Groups
  • Applications
  • Service principals
  • Conditional Access policies
  • Authentication method policy
  • Authorization policy
  • Named locations

Why this matters for IT administrators

This release gives Entra administrators a structured recovery option for common identity incidents that are often difficult to reverse manually.

Microsoft highlights several real-world scenarios:

  • Conditional Access lockouts: Restore a known-good policy after a mistaken change blocks users from signing in.
  • HR provisioning errors: Identify and roll back incorrect user attribute updates pushed at scale.
  • Malicious configuration changes: Recover from unauthorized edits made through a compromised privileged account.

For IT teams, the biggest benefit is reduced recovery time. Instead of manually recreating policies or scripting bulk corrections, admins can use Difference Reports to confirm what changed and then run a more precise recovery.

Licensing and availability

Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery is available now in public preview and requires an Entra ID P1 or P2 license. Admins can access it from the Entra ID blade in the Microsoft Entra admin center.

Next steps

If your organization relies heavily on Conditional Access, automated provisioning, and privileged role administration, this preview is worth evaluating.

Recommended actions:

  • Review whether your tenant has Entra ID P1 or P2 licensing
  • Open the Microsoft Entra admin center and explore the Backup and Recovery experience
  • Identify high-risk identity scenarios where backup-based recovery would reduce downtime
  • Update your identity incident response and disaster recovery procedures to include this capability

Microsoft Entra already focuses on service availability, but this preview adds a much-needed layer for recovering from tenant-level mistakes and security events.

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Read the original article by Joseph Dadzie
Microsoft EntraEntra IDbackup and recoveryConditional Accessidentity resilience

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