New Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery Introduced

Commvault, a leader in the data protection space, has launched an innovative new cleanroom technology, Commvault® Cloud Cleanroom™ Recovery. Commvault hopes to transform recovery processes in the hybrid cloud landscape. Let’s take a look at the details of this new solution.

Ransomware is everywhere

The problem of ransomware is literally everywhere. It seems we hear about ransomware attacks on the news, from blog posts, Reddit threads, YouTube, RSS feeds, and more. It is pervasive. It is also changing the way we look at recovery.

IT operations has gotten good at building systems that allow recovering from “normal” disasters, such as infrastructure failures, network issues, etc. You have backups and a DR site that you flip a switch and the DR site comes online with your data intact.

However, ransomware is changing the recovery mindset since you can no longer assume your data is good. You have to vet the data for integrity purposes and take a zero-trust approach.

Being ready for a disaster or cyberattack event is a moving target

Most organizations today have a myriad of interconnected systems that are hybrid in nature. No longer is it simply about on-premises systems that need to be recovered. Most businesses use some type of cloud service or SaaS solution for business-critical processes.

What’s more, many organizations rarely are able to test through full DR fully plans to know exactly all the apps and interdependencies between them to be 100% confident in the recovery process.

This novel offering enhances how companies respond to cyberattacks, ensuring the recovery of clean data copies securely and efficiently. Not limited to Fortune 50 companies, this technology extends to organizations of all sizes, promoting broader access to cleanroom technology. It also facilitates frequent recovery testing, empowering CISOs to confidently handle potential cyber threats.

Run books, table top exercises as good as they are do not really prepare organizations for all the details involved with ransomware recovery.

Introducing Commvault Cloud Cleanroom

Traditionally, cleanrooms require significant resources. Having the same hardware, equipment, network gear, and other physical assets simply for a clean room environment is cost-prohibitive. For the most part, it has made them inaccessible for many organizations due to high costs and complexity.

Commvault’s new offering addresses these challenges by offering a cloud-hosted solution that organizations can activate on-demand. This significantly reduces costs and investment in clean room resources.

The new Commvault offering compliments the existing recovery capabilities of Commvault, including the following:

• Operational recovery – This type of recovery supports business operations, accidental deletions, unexpected data corruptions, etc. Commvault Cloud backup and recovery is an advanced and intelligent data recovery platform that provides comprehensive data protection, converts data to destination format, scales up to boost recovery time objectives, scales down services when not in use and provides privacy controls to control access to data.
• Disaster recovery – Disaster recovery for business continuity and site recovery needed for things like natural disasters or outages. Comvault Cloud Auto Recovery is a flexible and cost-efficient data replication platform. It provides sub-minute RPO capabilities, near-zero RTO for data recovery, transforms data during replication, provides one-click orchestration production to DR, and vice versa, and you can use it for DR fire drills for recovery readiness validation.

The third recovery situation that is becoming unique is cyber recovery:

• Cyber recovery needs to recover data and applications affected by malware after a cyber incident. This is where Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery comes in.

Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery features

Note the following features of Commvault’s Cloud Cleanroom Recovery:

• It establishes and automates cleanrooms for recovery
• It provides logical group of heterogeneous workloads
• It provides secure scanning with built-in and customizable tools
• It enables recovery dependency checking and custom actions
• The Commvault control plane is accessible in the clean site
• Admins have recovery-centric monitoring, reporting, and auditing

Key Innovations of Commvault Cleanroom Recovery:

• Extension to SaaS Customers: It helps democratize advanced recovery solutions
• Cloud-based Hosting: Bad actors are thwarted with recovery orchestrated to a clean, isolated cloud environment, specifically in Microsoft Azure. This ensures operations can resume as quickly as possible and are secure
• Ease of Testing: Organizations can test and modify their cyber recovery strategies without the logistical nightmares previously associated with traditional cleanrooms.

Brian Brockway, CTO at Commvault, emphasizes the shift in recovery needs due to AI-driven attacks:

“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.”

Complex recoveries including Microsoft Active Directory

The solution is configured in Microsoft Azure and simplifies complex recoveries. Organizations can include critical services like Microsoft Active Directory. The secure cloud cleanroom helps ensure data integrity, security, and prevent unauthorized access.

It also integrates with native Microsoft cloud security tools like Microsoft Defender. These integrations help automate threat scanning and ensure the integrity of the environment. Commvault is also working on future collaborations with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR which will enhance security incident management.

It also benefits from the secure infrastructure of the Commvault Cloud platform, which meets stringent global security standards.

How are solutions like Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery helpful?

Organizations continue to battle with the challenges coming from a cyberattack involving ransomware. Knowing which data is infected and which is not is an extremely difficult task without the right tools. Traditional backups and disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure does not account for data possibly being suspect or infiltrated.

Vetting this data manually is a tremendously difficult and labor intensive process that can take days, weeks, or even months. Having the types of cybersecurity automation and cleanroom functionality is vital for organizations recovering from a cyber event.

What should you do next?

Learn more about the solution. It is now available, with further enhancements scheduled for release in summer and fall 2024. You can learn more about the Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery technology at the following resources:

• Official Press Release: Commvault Turns the Concept of Cleanrooms on Its Head: Democratizing the Technology and Giving CISOs / CIOs Confidence They Can Recover When Attacked 
• Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery – Cleanroom Recovery | Commvault
• Cleanroom at RSA conference – RSA Conference 2024 | Save Your Spot (commvault.com)