Commvault’s Cleanroom Recovery Uses Cloud To ‘Sanitize’ Data After Attack

‘Can you guarantee the environment into which you're recovering is clean? That's a really hard problem to solve. Most of the customers that I've talked with about this say they tried building something like this for two years and gave up because it's expensive. You have to have either a dark site or a whole set of virtual infrastructure for every permutation for every application that you want to test and recover. You have to have that duplicate environment. And it not only costs time, it's just really complex,’ says Tim Zonca, Commvault’s vice president of portfolio marketing.

Data protection software developer Commvault Monday unveiled Cleanroom Recovery, a new offering that provides a safe cloud-based recovery target to help businesses recover a clean copy of their data after a cyberattack as well as to test data recovery without the need for expensive data center infrastructures.

Cleanroom Recovery provides businesses of any size with an isolated recovery environment for data recovery as well as for testing disaster recovery capabilities, said Tim Zonca, vice president of portfolio marketing for the Tinton Falls, N.J.-based vendor.

A big problem with cyber recovery compared to traditional disaster recovery is a business cannot trust that the data they are looking to recover has not been compromised, Zonca told CRN.

“We have really sophisticated customers,” he said. “They've gotten great at disaster recovery, twice a year. They just failover from site A to site B, and Site B becomes their new production environment. And six months later, they go back. But I have a lot of customers recently tell me, ‘We don't know the last time we actually recovered from backup. And it terrifies us, because that's exactly what you would have to do in a cyber event.’”

Cleanroom Recovery helps them effectively recover data in a cyberattack with automation and capabilities that ensure data is clean before it is recovered, and can be brought back online as soon as possible, Zonca said.

Traditionally, not only can you not trust the data, but hardware gets infected as well in an attack, he said. “Can you guarantee the environment into which you're recovering is clean? That's a really hard problem to solve. Most of the customers that I've talked with about this say they tried building something like this for two years and gave up because it's expensive. You have to have either a dark site or a whole set of virtual infrastructure for every permutation for every application that you want to test and recover. You have to have that duplicate environment. And it not only costs time, it's just really complex.”

Cleanroom Recovery helps businesses recover their critical applications to a guaranteed clean location in the Commvault Cloud, Zonca said. It provides a single environment where customers can recover any different environment including AWS, Google, Oracle Cloud, Azure, or even on-premises, he said.

“All of a sudden, what used to be teams of people that had to understand all these different permutations, you can now do it in one place,” he said. “You can test this continually. Every quarter, you can run a test. You're only spinning up this environment when you need it. You're not paying for it when you don't, unlike a dark site or set of virtual infrastructure. This drastically decreases the resources needed because we do all the automation and translation from multiple environments to one.”

Cleanroom Recovery is not a set of checklists or simulations of ‘what-if’ scenarios, Zonca said.

“You can actually run those operational tests so that you can iron out the issues you're going to run into before you have an existential event on your hands,” he said.

Cleanroom Recovery is a brilliant offering, said Kevin Cronin, CEO of Kelyn Technologies, a Parker, Colo.-based solution provider and long-time Commvault channel partner.

“This is using the cloud for what it’s good at,” Cronin told CRN. “The cloud provides almost infinite flexibility and scalability, and using it to help with disaster recovery is a perfect use case. For on-prem applications and workloads, being ready to instantly migrate to another location is important. But no one wants to keep enough hardware around to rebuild their entire infrastructures. It’s too expensive.”

But Cleanroom Recovery overcomes that issue, Cronin said.

“Now customers can use the cleanroom to temporarily house and sanitize their data,” he said. “No one wants to re-infect their data. This lets customers essentially bring whatever anti-virus signatures to run the data through the sanitization process so they don’t bring back malware or whatever.”

Cleanroom Recovery, like any disaster recovery technology, will need some evangelization from solution providers, Cronin said.

“Selling disaster recovery of any kind is like selling life insurance: no one wants to think about it,” he said. “But I’ve talked with customers about this and received positive feedback. We have a friendly customer base, and they’re not saying, ‘Yeah, sure.’ The feedback was uplifting, positive feedback.”

Cloud Recovery is a tremendous partner opportunity, said Alan Atkinson, Commvault’s chief partner officer.

“We've seen a crazy amount of interest from the partner community, especially from the partners that are closest to us,” Atkinson told CRN. “When you think about writing those recovery plans or coordinating those tests, Cleanroom Recovery generates a dashboard where you can look at things like, ‘How did we do,’ and then try to iteratively improve it. There's a lot of services and value in there that Commvault is not going to provide. We need help. And that's where the partners really have a valuable role to play. And so it's gotten a lot of interest.”

Cleanroom Ready will typically be attached to an existing software customer, although Commvault expects to also take it to new customers, Atkinson said.

“But if you think about our installed base, this is an opportunity for the partner community to go back and approach those folks about a high-value problem they know they've got to solve, but they didn't know they could solve,” he said. “We've seen a lot of interest from our biggest partners. And to be fair, it's still pretty new, so that interest has really been from some of our biggest customers in the U.S.”