The emerging cyber resiliency marketplace is evolving fast, and there’s lots of new terms to get to grips with. As a market-leader in cyber recovery cleanroom tech, we often get asked… “What’s the difference between a cyber recovery cleanroom and a cyber vault?” These two terms often get confused, and while they share some similarities, they are fundamentally different.
This article will explain:
- What each of these terms mean
- How they are different
- Which one you need
Before we dive in, it’s worth noting that this article focuses on the concepts and high-level technology. It doesn’t dig into, or promote any technology vendor’s solutions specifically.
What is a Cyber Vault?
A cyber vault is a highly secure, isolated environment designed to protect critical data from cyber threats such as ransomware, insider attacks, and other malicious activities. Its primary purpose is to ensure that organisations have a safe repository for their most sensitive or valuable data, which can be restored in the event of a breach or data corruption.
Think of it like a bank vault. Once your valuables are locked away they can’t be accessed by unauthorised parties. Anything you lock away will remain completely untouched and unchanged until you choose to access it.
To be classed as a cyber vault, a solution should have the following features or characteristics:
• Isolation and Air-Gapping:
The cyber vault should be either physically or logically separated from the primary network, ensuring attackers cannot directly access it during a cyberattack. A physical air gap could be created by backing up a copy of your data to tape media and storing the tape in a vault, literally! If using connected storage, the access should be restricted by network segmentation.
• Immutable Backups:
Data stored in the vault should be immutable, meaning it cannot be altered or deleted once written, safeguarding it from tampering.
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Encryption:
Strict access controls and data encryption are essential to protect the vault from unauthorised access.
Here’s the next common question:
“Does a cyber vault give me cyber resilience? “
The answer:
Not quite.
While immutable backups are a crucial component of cyber resiliency, they do not protect you from all possible events.
Immutable backups are safe from modification once stored, meaning they can’t be tampered with or encrypted by malicious actors once they are stored in your cyber vault. But they don’t protect against an initial infection.
If your primary systems are compromised before a backup is made, your backups will almost certainly become compromised too. This is particularly concerning for ransomware attacks, where the attack might go unnoticed for long periods. Essentially, undetected malware will be replicated into your vault, with the risk of reinfecting your systems if you need to run a restore from your vaulted data.
Restoring from immutable backups can also be a complex process, especially if recovery processes aren’t regularly tested. Some organisations struggle with recovering from an immutable backups due to lack of familiarity with the specific tools or processes required. Therefore, the use of immutable storage may be restricted to a subset of data – usually the most critical assets.
What is a Cyber Recovery Cleanroom?
A cyber recovery cleanroom is also a secure, isolated environment – but its main purpose is to validate the cleanliness and recoverability of backup systems (including immutable snapshots) with the goal of minimising downtime during a data loss incident.
There are a variety of cyber recovery cleanroom solutions on the market and the prevailing trend shifts the emphasis from post-crisis recovery to proactive, automated, daily validation to help prevent attacks, and not just remediate the impacts. This means that a cleanroom is no longer a reactive ‘just in case’ investment – your cleanroom is a proactive weapon for both defence and response.
Unlike a cyber vault, where the whole purpose is that the data remains unchanged, data in your cleanroom is active. Your cleanroom is a location to run validation processes and in some cases, malware removal processes too.
For a deeper-dive, check-out this Guide to Cyber Recovery Cleanrooms.
Which Do You Need, A Cyber Vault or a Cyber Recovery Cleanroom?
It shouldn’t be an either/or decision. Both technologies deliver different benefits, and the most robust solutions for cyber resilience should incorporate the characteristics of both cyber vaults and cyber recovery cleanrooms. This customer story explains how a large utilities operator have deployed a cyber recovery cleanroom alongside their cyber vault solution.
For ultimate resiliency, mature organisations build secure storage and backup platforms that incorporate these 5 fundamentals:
- Keeping multiple copies of data (preferably three or more)
- Keeping an air-gapped copy of data
- Encrypting your most sensitive data
- Employing immutable copies to prevent corruption of data
- Using orchestration to recovery test and scan backup copies
For more information on the 5 fundamentals of cyber resilience check out the Recovery Gap eBook.
Start Your Journey to Greater Resiliency
If you want to boost cyber resilience in your organisation, a Recovery Risk Report is a great place to start. It’s an automated, AI-powered reporting tool, designed to quickly highlight vulnerabilities and uncover recovery risks in your backup environment without the need for costly, intrusive consultancy.
