You may remember that Commvault Shift 2023 happened back in November 2023, at the time – I attended (virtually) and one of the coolest features they announced (and also certainly one of the coolest features I have seen in the Backup and Recovery space) was something called Commvault® Cloud Cleanroom Recovery
In my blog post covering the event at the time, I highlighted some key insights: Alongside the staggering 30-billion-dollar impact of ransomware on businesses, which underscores the severe threat it poses to companies of all sizes, Commvault introduced a new feature called Cleanroom Recovery.
This feature streamlines the recovery process, reducing downtime, and enabling businesses to quickly restore normal operations after a ransomware attack. In the old days, to test a backup viability of being able to restore from it, companies had to have a dedicated backup environment for every single critical app, on every server, in every location separate from each other.
That’s a lot of investment to allocate to something that is not needed all the time, and most companies just can’t afford to fund this. The need for this feature was valid and so clear.
Recently Commvault has made some super awesome enhancements to the Cleanroom Recovery capability to allow customers to test their recovery plans across their entire IT estate.
How do they do this? First, they are announcing support for SaaS deployment, being that this removes the requirement to dedicate a platform to run the environment, this gives any customer the option to access its capabilities from anywhere on the internet making fast recovery testing super accessible. And as the Cleanroom Recovery service is now being hosted in Microsoft Azure, customers can run up a recovery test and only pay for the consumption of what they use and for however long they use it. No more dedicated on-standby environments saving thousands of dollars in capital expense and ongoing maintenance costs.
The need for recovery is critical, even more than backup!
A lot of technologists in this space say backup is important, but recovery is critical. Without proven and tested recoveries, then backups are more or less useless as they cant be relied on, and the worse possible time to find a backup dataset is unable to be recovered is during a disaster or severity one.
This forms the business needs for regular scheduled testing of recoveries, but how does one achieve this when production environment is in play, and attempting to test recoveries have the potential to cause a performance impact on the primary infrastructure? Testing in a live environment can disrupt normal operations, leading to productivity loss and customer dissatisfaction. By using an isolated environment, companies can conduct thorough recovery testing without impacting production systems and ultimately customer or user experiences.
The need for Cleanroom
That really where Commvault CleanRoom recovery comes in, removing the concern for not only production impact, but also ensuring the recovery process is tested in a safe way completely isolating your most precious data (production) away from harm. In fact, in an isolated environment, organisations can ensure that the testing does not create any risk by spreading any existing malware or other threats to live production systems. This effectively helps maintain the integrity and security of the primary environment while still conducting comprehensive tests (and validity of recovery) by making it merely impossible for contaminated data to make its way in.
Testing in isolation also provides an opportunity to analyse any potential threats or gaps in the environment without interference from active production systems. Again, this helps organisations understand the root cause of an attack (potentially before it happens to the production environment), how it occurred, and what damage was inflicted, allowing them to learn from the incident and proactively improve their security position and defences.
Embrace the breach!! – The value of Cleanroom for Recovery testing for reducing Business Impact
By creating a secure, isolated test environment, organisations can safely uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their systems without risking exposure to real threats or causing performance hits. It cant be understated what the impact could be for these organisations who run the risk of testing their recovery capabilities without it.
In addition to Cleanroom Recovery feature improvements, there has been some notable graphical interface enhancements, heres a quick snapshot on three popular views.
Cleanroom Recovery Groups
A recovery group for CleanRoom is a logical container that groups together entities (such as virtual machines ) that need to be recovered together into the Commvault cleanroom environment, you can also set priority on which recovery groups needs to be restored first.
Restore Jobs
An extremely easy way to see if your recovery testing succeeds or not, and when start and end times occur indicating RTOs obligations
Finally, The Company Overview dashboard
Certainly the best dashboard and perhaps most important for quick and easy visibility into gauging the company’s backup and recovery health check.
A special event for Security Buffs – RSA Conference 2024
But wait, there’s more! – I am also excited to share that from this Monday 6th May, the highly anticipated RSA Conference 2024 | Save Your Spot (commvault.com) is happening at Moscone Center in San Francisco, USA. Although I can’t attend in person, there is a bunch of information online about the event –
With the theme “The Art of Possible,” There is a heap of distinguished speakers set to share their insights on the latest cybersecurity trends, challenges, and solutions. The roster of speakers includes Sundhar Annamalai, President of AT&T Cybersecurity, Christine Frye, Chief Privacy Officer at Bank of America, , and Jennifer Minella, Founder and Principal Advisor at Viszen Security.
The conference offers a comprehensive program of expert-led sessions, interactive workshops, and thought-provoking panels. With hundreds of sessions covering assorted topics—such as threat detection, data privacy, and emerging technologies—attendees will have a ton of opportunities to expand their knowledge and enhance their skills around all things cybersecurity and ransomware.
Commvault will be located at Booth #N-4308 (map can be found here), and should you want to see the Cloud Cleanroom Recovery in action! check out booth N-5778 in North Expo!
In closing
As Commvault Cleanroom technology advances, it provides customers with an increasingly robust platform to test their disaster recovery scenarios in a dedicated, isolated environment, separate from their live production systems.
This awesome SaaS solution offers a secure space where companies can experiment with various recovery processes without the risk of impacting their day-to-day production operations. With this level of security and flexibility, IT teams can simulate real-world recovery situations to uncover potential weaknesses in their backup and recovery plans. They can test their backup systems, validate recovery time objectives (and actually say with confidence that they can meet SLAs and RTOs), and ensure that their critical data can be restored efficiently when needed. The ability to conduct such comprehensive testing in a controlled isolated setting not only reduces risk but also boosts the organisation’s confidence in their backup systems overall.
It is going to be a great week for Cybersecurity buffs!!!
