Are you considering deploying a cyber recovery cleanroom to test your systems’ recoverability from cyber-attacks or other disruptive events?
You’re not alone. The market for recovery assurance solutions, including cleanroom technology, is growing rapidly. Learn more in this article:
5 Reasons the Cyber Recovery Cleanroom Market is Growing Fast.
A common question we hear is; should you build a cleanroom or invest in an off-the-shelf (productised) solution? This article explores the pros and cons of each approach and provides a simple decision tree to help guide your choice.
This discussion assumes that you intend to use a cleanroom for proactive recovery testing rather than solely for post-attack recovery. While productised solutions can expedite deployment after an attack, their primary strength lies in pre-emptive recovery testing and assurance.
Cleanroom customisation
If your environment requires significant customisation, building your own cleanroom might be the best option. A DIY solution allows for precise tailoring to your infrastructure, whereas productised solutions are designed to serve a broad market.
For example, if your workloads include mainframes or iSeries systems that productised solutions do not support, a self-build approach may be your only choice. However, if your environment primarily consists of virtualised workloads—such as VMware, Windows, and Linux file systems—then a productised solution is a viable and often preferable option.
CleanRoom Security
For organisations operating dark sites with no permissible cloud connectivity, a DIY approach may be necessary. Many productised solutions rely on cloud-based control planes for features like AI-driven anomaly detection, and losing this connectivity can limit their effectiveness.
However, an isolated environment comes with trade-offs. Without internet access, you forfeit real-time malware definitions, security updates, and continuous product enhancements—features that productised solutions deliver automatically.
Cleanroom Automation
Productised cleanrooms benefit from advanced workflow automation that optimises resource allocation for recovery testing and malware scanning.
A key component of modern recovery assurance solutions is the use of data lakes and AI/ML models to prioritise anomalies for deeper analysis. The best cleanroom solutions leverage feedback learning to refine anomaly detection and minimise false positives over time.
If you lack in-house data scientists and software engineers, a DIY solution will likely lack the automation and orchestration capabilities of a commercial product.
Cleanroom ease-of-use
If ease of deployment and maintenance is a priority, a productised solution is the clear choice. Here’s why:
- Rapid Deployment – Modern cleanroom software can be deployed in under a day using standard infrastructure.
- Automated Security Patching – Productised solutions can integrate with repositories like GitHub, continuously downloading updates and enhancements to stay ahead of emerging threats.
- Vendor Support & Testing – Purchasing a product means gaining access to enterprise-grade testing, support, and maintenance. Many organisations opt for productised solutions to offload the burden of software development and patching.
Summary & Decision Process
For comparable costs, a productised solution will always provide a more feature-rich and automated cleanroom for supported workloads. Security concerns may restrict the use of some cloud-dependent cleanrooms, but some vendors offer private cloud deployments as an alternative.
As adoption increases and cleanroom solutions become more mainstream, productised offerings will continue to improve while costs decline, making the build-your-own approach increasingly less viable.
By following this structured approach, you can determine the best path forward for implementing a cyber recovery cleanroom tailored to your organisation’s needs.
Learn about Cyber Recovery Cleanrooms from Predatar
Predatar is a leader in Recovery Assurance technology. Our unique CleanRoom solution provides preemptive recovery testing and advanced malware scanning for backups and snapshots from many leading storage vendors including Veeam, Rubrik, IBM, Cohesity and Pure – with support for more technologies on the way.
Learn more at predatar.com.
