Commvault turns concept of cleanrooms on its head

Via its groundbreaking Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery offering, the company is transforming – from every vantage point – what recovery looks like in the modern world:

how companies can safely and securely recover a clean copy of their data after a cyberattack;

where they can recover to – ushering in on-demand cleanroom recovery to the cloud;

which companies can access cleanroom technology – not just the Fortune 50, but organisations of all sizes; and

when recovery testing can be done – monthly if desired – so CISOs can say with confidence to their board, ‘when we’re hit, we know we can make a clean recovery.’

A cleanroom is an isolated recovery environment that is frequently used for secure cyber recovery scenarios. However, traditional cleanrooms are often resource-intensive, requiring organisations to maintain duplicative environments for every critical application across every server and every location. Many organisations simply can’t afford to do this.

Additionally, many companies don’t have the time, money, or staff required to test all the interdependencies across these types of hybrid environments to know they can recover when attacked. If they can test, and it fails, they often don’t have the resources to test again. This leaves organisations unpracticed, vulnerable, and at the mercy of bad actors. Commvault is solving these problems.

The Cleanroom Concept Reimagined

Commvault has reimagined the cleanroom from the ground up.

First, Cleanroom Recovery is being extended to support Commvault’s SaaS customers*. This deployment option democratises the technology so that companies of all sizes can benefit from the offering. Second, the cleanroom is being hosted in the cloud. When bad actors strike, Cleanroom Recovery is designed to orchestrate recovery into a clean, isolated location in Microsoft Azure. Customers can do this on-demand and only pay for it when they use it. Third, Cleanroom Recovery uniquely gives organisations the ability to rapidly and regularly test and, if necessary, retest their cyber recovery plans with ease across their IT infrastructure.

“With disaster recovery, testing your recovery strategy once a year was fine. For example, with a natural disaster, you didn’t have to worry about bad actors infiltrating your systems. You just needed to be able to recover. Now, with AI-driven attacks, threat vectors change by the hour. The need to not only test your recovery frequently but know you have a clean place to recover in the cloud has never been more important,” said Brian Brockway, CTO, Commvault.

Cleanroom Recovery provides numerous benefits.

Simple:

Customers can quickly set up a cleanroom-on-demand in Microsoft Azure.

Cleanroom recovery also simplifies the recovery of applications and the data those applications rely on. For example, Cleanroom Recovery will be designed to restore Microsoft Active Directory*. This is the service that controls human access to all applications and other critical enterprise assets. Being able to easily restore Active Directory and validate its consistency and operational health can help ensure proper authorisations to data remain in place.

Secure:

With Commvault, because the cleanroom is generated on-demand in the cloud, it is designed to be untainted since it doesn’t exist until the organisation needs to use it.

Commvault cleanrooms are in an isolated environment, so application testing and production system backup can be conducted in a safe space.

Cleanroom Recovery includes an integration with Microsoft Defender that automates threat scanning to help ensure data is clean.

In addition, Cleanroom Recovery will include capabilities** that enable companies to rebuild applications and services from a known clean state, as needed. This can help customers maintain server operations while enhancing security and efficiency.

Intelligent:

AI-enabled Cleanpoint™ Validation automatically empowers customers to rapidly identify the last clean recovery point.

Users can customise recovery sequences, so data is recovered in a logical order. Users can also easily convert VMs from any hypervisor to Azure VMs.

A forthcoming integration with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR** extends the power of Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery. It enables customers to investigate security incidents by utilising XSOAR to enrich incidents with the latest threat intelligence data – streamlining the recovery of compromised assets into a cleanroom for forensic analysis and rapid, secure cyber recovery.

With Cleanroom Recovery, customers also benefit from the Commvault Cloud platform, powered by Metallic AI. Commvault Cloud meets the most stringent global security standards and is currently the only FedRAMP High In Process data protection platform. The platform’s unique architecture enables customers to secure and recover their data, across any workload, and from any location to any location. And, in the future, via its recent Appranix acquisition, customers will be able to uniquely blend risk, readiness, and recovery capabilities provided by Commvault with cloud application rebuild capabilities provided by Appranix.

“Enterprises need to think about their cyber preparedness strategy, including protecting mission critical assets via secure and air-gapped backups and the ability to recover fast,” said Aung Oo, General Manager, Azure Storage, Microsoft. “Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery augments air-gapped data protection built on Azure with fast and secure recovery. It enables customers to test their resilience plans, and when necessary, recover to a trusted, clean, isolated location in Microsoft Azure. The clean and isolated copy also enables forensics for auditors and insurers and gives organisations a tremendous advantage in the fight against ransomware and other cyber threats.”

“Our research shows that ransomware and cyberattacks in general are an existential risk for the vast majority of organisations. In an environment where ransomware and AI-driven cyberattacks are increasingly sophisticated, Commvault’s Cleanroom Recovery critically enables organisations to maintain operational integrity through a continuous loop of testing and constant adaptation,” said Christophe Bertrand, Practice Director, Enterprise Strategy Group. “This solution not only meets the critical need for resilience but evolves with it.”

“Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery not only enables organisations to test their recovery plans often, but know that if they’re hit, they can be resilient,” said Zach Kruszewski, Manager CCoE Compute Architecture and Design Team, Emerson Electric, a Commvault customer. “Having this sense of security is so important in the ransomware era.”