While traditional backup systems are designed to recover an organisation’s data following a breach, they have generally become the primary target of hackers who will try to compromise them early in a cyberattack cycle.

“Traditional backup platforms typically require expensive infrastructure to run and cannot ensure that there are valid and clean backups available post the attack that have not been infected,” Graham Brown, country manager at Commvault told EngineerIT. “They are thus unable to prevent reinfection and can also not detect whether threat actors are still silently hiding within the environment. To effectively circumvent these limitations, organisations should consider adopting a cleanroom recovery system that offers a secure, isolated, cloud-based environment for system restoration, making it a crucial investment for any business.”

Verified data

Because it is an isolated environment, a cleanroom stores verified data that is known to be consistent and clean and is therefore recoverable. Hence the main benefit of cleanroom technology is its ability to ensure safe data recovery with no chance of reinfection, which in turn minimises costly downtime.

Cleanroom recovery technology can identify clean backups by advanced scanning of data that already resides in the backup repositories to detect any threats and anomalous or malicious software inside these data sets. This will determine whether anything in the repository may be unsafe and compromise the recoverability of that piece of data. Furthermore, cleanroom recovery includes a verification process that allows mock tests and simulated runs of some key data recovery processes to help ensure the data is clean.

Because the cleanroom is cloud-based, this environment can be “spun up” quickly and its dependence on minimal infrastructure means that a rapid recovery can be carried out coupled with swift restoration of data. These capabilities are key to ensuring that a business can be up and running within a short period following an attack.

Potential risks

Businesses that do not use secure recovery methods like cleanroom recovery face several potential risks. Prolonged downtime is likely the biggest impact, which can severely affect an organisation’s productivity. This in turn can lead to major financial losses and reputational damage.

However, the biggest risk is around the legal consequences of data loss, which can be severe and multifaceted, impacting businesses in several critical ways. Given the current risk and compliance landscape, organisations could face financial penalties, legal action or even criminal charges in extreme cases.

Considering what is at stake when a cyberattack happens, the importance of proactive resilience cannot be overstated. Businesses must ensure that they have the right platforms in place that will facilitate proactivity and deliver resiliency capabilities.

“Cyberattacks are inevitable and organisations must note that traditional backup approaches will have limitations, which can result in downtime, financial losses and reputational damage. Considering that cleanroom recovery can effectively mitigate these risks, investing in this technology should not be seen as a grudge purchase. Rather, it is an investment that can provide peace of mind for organisations with the knowledge that they can recover from a cyberattack in a short amount of time,” Brown said.