Locked Out: When Identity Becomes the Weak Link 

It’s Monday morning.

You fire up the laptop, coffee in hand, ready for the week. Outlook asks for your password, which is weird. You type it in. No luck. Try again. Nothing. Maybe it’s expired. You reset it. The code doesn’t arrive. Now you’re locked out.

Annoying, right? We’ve all been there. A few wasted minutes, a call to IT, and you’re back in. Now imagine the same thing happening — not to you, but to everyone.

The everyday annoyance, amplified 

No one in your business can log in. Outlook is blank. Teams meetings don’t connect. SharePoint sites time out. Exchange mailboxes are unreachable. Not because the apps are down — but because the identity layer, Microsoft Entra ID, has been hit.

Encrypted. Deleted. Corrupted.

What was a minor irritation for one person has become a total outage for thousands. Work stops instantly.

When prevention isn’t enough 

You’ve got MFA. You’ve got conditional access. You’ve got all the right prevention in place. But prevention isn’t perfect. And once attackers get into your identity layer, prevention can’t bring it back.

At that point, there’s only one question that matters: Can you recover it? 

What’s really at stake 

Identity isn’t just usernames and passwords. It’s who can send an email. Who can join a meeting. Who can access a contract. When identity is gone, trust and productivity go with it. Minutes of downtime become hours, and hours turn into real cost.

It’s the difference between one user grumbling about a password reset, and a whole business stuck on the outside looking in.

Recovery is the difference 

That’s why Backup Exec now includes Microsoft Entra ID protection — not bolted on, not licensed per user, but built in. Users, groups, app registrations, enterprise apps, and their relationships: all backed up, all recoverable.

So when the lockout comes, you’re not helpless. You can turn frustration into control, outage into access, downtime into business-as-usual.

So what? 

If you never face that day — perfect. But if you do, you’ll want more than prevention. You’ll want a way back in.

That’s what Backup Exec gives you: the ability to recover identities, workloads, and collaboration, all from one place.

Because being locked out for five minutes is annoying. Being locked out forever is unthinkable.