Speeding recovery with cleanrooms

Ian Wood at Commvault explains the benefits of cleanrooms for building a stronger cyber-resilience strategy

 

The increasing frequency and severity of cyber-threats is prompting security leaders to strengthen their organisation’s ability to prevent, withstand and recover from cyber-security incidents with minimal disruption or risk – and with good reason.

 

Despite deploying the best perimeter security out there, the odds of bad actors getting in remain high. With this in mind, the ability to rapidly restore environments to a secure state has become a mission critical imperative. That’s especially true for highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, the utility sector, or financial services, where an effective cyber-recovery strategy is now a must have for maintaining compliance and avoiding fines.

 

To test their cyber-readiness and maximise their ability to recover should an attack take place, organisations need to implement a cleanroom or isolated recovery environment (IRE) to speed up recovery and minimise any risk of data contamination.

 

Cleanroom recovery for testing and failover

Providing a safe, isolated, and controlled environment where organisations can undertake the secure and reliable retrieval of data from infected systems, a cleanroom is more than just a physical space. It’s a comprehensive approach to cyber-recovery that encompasses the creation of a standalone environment separate from the production environment, together with well-defined best practices and testing procedures that minimise the risk of further damage or contamination during the recovery process itself.

 

In the event of a breach, affected systems or devices are first isolated from the production network and all compromised data securely transferred to the cleanroom using encrypted channels and protocols. The compromised data is then analysed and assessed to evaluate the extent of the breach and any potential impact on the organisation. This process will include identifying compromised systems, data types and any potential vulnerabilities that led to the breach.

 

Next, clean backups or unaffected copies of the data are restored in the cleanroom environment and checked to ensure the recovered data is free from malware or malicious code and has been verified for accuracy and completeness. After this, additional security measures such as patching and stronger access controls are implemented to protect the recovered data and prevent re-infection. Finally, prior to transition back into production, all recovered systems and data are tested and verified to assure functionality and reliability.

 

Since cleanroom recovery plays such a crucial role in maintaining compliance with data protection and industry standards, organisations will need to follow industry best practices, use advanced security technologies to assure the security and integrity of recovered data and minimise potential risks or disruptions during the reintroduction process itself.

 

By doing so, organisations can ensure they are compliant with cyber-security directives such as NIS2 as well as industry-specific regulations such as HIPPA, PCI DSS or DORA that specify secure data recovery capabilities as being a requirement for protecting sensitive data.

 

Additional use cases for cleanrooms

Cleanroom recovery gives organisations a systematic and meticulous process that enables them to restore and recover without the risk of re-infection in the event of a breach. However, it also provides a valuable recovery option for a variety of other scenarios. 

• Physical damage: Cleanroom recovery is indispensable when storage devices sustain physical damage due to water, fire, impact or contaminant exposure and organisations need to ensure the recovery process is undertaken with zero risk of additional harm to their hardware or the integrity of data held on these devices.
• Forensic analysis: Cleanrooms provide a secure environment for conducting a forensic analysis of known infected systems. This enables organisations to identify the root cause of an attack and take steps to prevent further incidents.
• Simplified failover: In the event of a breach, cleanrooms can serve as a production failover solution that enables organisations to quickly and easily recover workloads and minimise downtime.
• Testing cyber-recovery plans: Today’s cloud-based cleanroom recovery solutions enable organisations to test their cyber-recovery plans without causing any disruption to business operations. This allows security teams to be confident in their recovery plans as any mistakes or obstacles can be identified in testing and resolved, so that when the times comes, the organisation can recover quickly and seamlessly. 
• Advanced data recovery: When standard data recovery methods fail, cleanroom recovery provides an advanced approach and specialist resources for handling critical data and the retrieval of valuable information.

 

Looking to the future

Cleanroom recovery is evolving fast, thanks to the integration of AI and machine learning tools that elevate the accuracy of recovery processes and automate tasks for greater speed and efficiency. Meanwhile, the emergence of cloud-based recovery solutions means organisations can now recover data directly from cloud environments and take advantage of powerful data analytics and visualisation tools that deliver deeper insights into their recovered data.

 

In the near future, automation and robotics promise to streamline cleanroom recovery processes and assist in the handling and repair of damaged storage devices.

 

Enabling today’s organisations to elevate and test their cyber-recovery plans and restore systems without fear of being re-compromised, cleanrooms facilitate the rapid cyber-recovery and response that is foundational for assuring business continuity and cyber-resilience. 

 

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Ian Wood is Senior Director Systems Engineering at Commvault

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Filograph