Month: April 2025

Oliver Parpart’s journey to leading two strategic growth initiatives at CANCOM GmbH is anything but conventional. With a rich background in project delivery, Oliver brings a deeply consultative and empathetic approach to client engagement — an approach shaped by years of hands-on experience ensuring IT service delivery success.

Unlike many leaders from a sales background, his method is not about pushing products but about deeply understanding a client’s environment and project delivery challenges. This ability to listen and ask good questions before prescribing solutions sets his team apart in a market dominated by large and competitive System Houses.

This client-first mentality has also influenced the strategic direction of his business unit, which focuses on two major growth initiatives: CANCOM’s DevOps practice and its Cyber Resilience practice.

As cybersecurity threats evolve rapidly, CANCOM is positioning itself as a trusted partner that can not only sell and integrate good technology but also deliver real business outcomes in a scalable, cost-effective way. At the heart of this approach is CANCOM’s Backup Assurance as a Service (BAaaS), a comprehensive, vendor-agnostic cyber resilience platform powered by Predatar.

Why Predatar?

CANCOM has a broad portfolio of backup and storage solutions. However, the complexity of modern enterprise IT landscapes demands a more unified approach to cyber resilience. This is where Predatar’s independence becomes a strategic advantage. Unlike vendor-specific solutions that often create silos, Predatar enables CANCOM to deliver a horizontal cyber resilience service that spans multiple technologies. This means customers can optimize costs, reduce complexity, and proactively defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

With BAaaS, CANCOM can rapidly elevate a client’s cyber resilience capabilities, deploying advanced security measures in a matter of weeks rather than months. This speed and efficiency are critical in the German and Austrian markets, where there is a shortage of highly skilled cybersecurity professionals. By leveraging Predatar’s automation and intelligence-driven platform, CANCOM can fill this gap, ensuring clients remain protected without the burden of hiring scarce in-house expertise.

Overcoming Internal Challenges to Scale the Service

Despite the strong market demand for cyber resilience services, CANCOM faces an internal challenge: ensuring its vast sales force of over 300 professionals across Germany—and 5,600 employees across Europe—are equipped to sell and support this new offering. Historically, CANCOM’s regional offices have had their own vendor preferences, making a unified approach difficult to implement.

To address this, CANCOM has developed strategic competencies that are independent of its vendor resale model. This allows the company to scale its BAaaS offering across its entire enterprise while improving margin performance and revenue predictability. Additionally, the sales enablement strategy includes a structured playbook and digital sales room templates via the Seismic platform, ensuring that all sales professionals can effectively communicate the value of CANCOM’s cyber resilience services.

Incubating BAaaS for Long-Term Success

To ensure the successful rollout of BAaaS, CANCOM made a considered decision to incubate the service within its Professional Services division, rather than placing it under the IBM resale business. This approach allows for tight control over initial deployments, ensuring quality and consistency. Over time, as adoption grows, the service will transition into CANCOM’s managed cyber and security services practice, enabling it to scale across a broader customer base.

The Future of Cyber Resilience at CANCOM

Cyber threats continue to evolve, and businesses need to be just as agile in their defences. With its consultative approach, deep technical expertise, and enhanced use of Predatar, CANCOM is well-positioned to deliver enterprise-grade cyber resilience at scale. The company’s ability to unify multiple backup and security technologies into a single, cohesive service offering is a game-changer for customers looking to simplify and strengthen their defences. By tackling internal and external challenges head-on, Oliver Parpart and his team are not just building another service — they are shaping the future of cyber resilience in Europe. Through strategic partnerships, an innovative delivery model, and a relentless focus on client success, CANCOM is proving that cybersecurity is not just about technology — it’s about trust, expertise, and execution at scale.

Start Your Journey To Resilience with an APEX Partner

CANCOM is a Predatar’s APEX partner, one of an elite group of expert service providers hand-picked for their customer-centricity, and their ability to deliver world-class cyber resiliency services powered by Predatar. To kick start your cyber resiliency project, contact the team at CANCOM or find an APEX Partner near you.

Bringing automated, AI-powered recovery testing and advanced malware hunting to your existing storage estate has never been easier.

At Predatar, we’ve launched our third-generation cleanroom. Not only is CleanRoom 3 the most advanced cyber recovery cleanroom on the market, it’s also easy to deploy and easy to manage.

Our new CleanRoom has been re-designed from the ground up with one objective – to make adoption of recovery assurance technology achievable to more organisations than ever before.

Until now, complexity has been a real barrier to adoption. This short article explains how we’ve simplified deployment and management of cleanroom technology.

What is a Cyber Recovery Cleanroom?

Before we talk about how Predatar is making cleanroom technology quick and easy to deploy, let’s recap on what cleanrooms are, and why your organisation needs one.

The truth is, there is a significant risk that your backups and immutable snapshots contain malware or other recovery issues. This will jeopardise your incident response, and severely impact your ability to restore business-critical IT systems following a cyberattack, or any other data-loss event.

A cleanroom is a secure, isolated environment where your IT team can validate the integrity and recoverability of the data your organisation will rely on for recovery – before a crisis hits.

4 years of CleanRoom implementations

CleanRoom 1: The original

Built for IBM Storage Protect backup environments, Predatar’s first generation Cyber Recovery Cleanroom was a game-changer. Previously, Cleanrooms (or Isolated Recovery Environments as they were commonly referred to at the time) were little more than a concept – often just an architectural design or blueprint, which could be deployed as a reactive tool for validating data in a crisis scenario.

When Predatar launched CleanRoom 1 in 2021, it was the first ‘productised’ cyber recovery cleanroom solution available. Not only did this make proactive cyber recovery testing a reality for IBM backup customers, but Predatar’s user-friendly software layer made day-to-day operation easy.

The difficult bit was deployment. Every storage estate is different, and every CleanRoom implementation needed a tailored design. A typical deployment would require 10-15 days of implementation services from highly skilled Predatar engineers. What’s more, each CleanRoom deployment would require new hardware or cloud infrastructure to be purchased and configured – sometimes adding weeks or months to the deployment depending on hardware availability.

CleanRoom 2: Multi-vendor support and faster deployments

The release of CleanRoom 2 in 2023 was another huge step forward. By extending support beyond IBM backup products to Cohesity, Veeam and Rubrik, and later adding capabilities to validate Immutable Snapshots on IBM FlashSystem and Pure Storage, Predatar had opened up the possibilities of recovery assurance to many more organisations.  

Other enhancements followed, including integrations with leading SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) platforms, AI-powered reporting, and more.

Despite CleanRoom 2 delivering greatly enhanced capabilities, the Predatar R&D team managed to significantly simplify deployments. Now a Predatar implementation could be completed in 3-5 days by an experienced Predatar Engineer, or one of Predatar’s APEX partners.

CleanRoom 3: Recovery Assurance For All

Our 3rd-generation CleanRoom marks another big leap forward. CleanRoom 3 has been designed to make Recovery Assurance technology accessible to more organisations than ever before, by breaking down the barriers to adoption. The cost and complexity of deployment has been one of those barriers.

Cleanroom 3 can be deployed on existing infrastructure, in less than one day, without the need for extensive training.

Here’s what’s changed…

New: ISO-based deployment

The most significant change, is that CleanRoom 3 is delivered as a self-contained virtual appliance. Users configure their cleanroom via a step-by-step setup wizard, before downloading a self-contained ISO image.

The ISO includes all the required components, pre-configured using the inputs from the wizard. Assuming the technical pre-reqs and minimum requirements are met, the ISO image can simply be installed on existing hardware or Cloud Infrastructure, and can be up and running in as little as 2 hours.

New: No third-party licences

Previously, Predatar customers would need to purchase VMware and third-party XDR (Extended Endpoint Detection & Response) licences for the CleanRoom. Not only did this add cost and administrative work, but it also added complexity to the setup, as the CleanRoom would need to be configured to recognise the licence keys for the third-party products.

With CleanRoom 3, the need for third-party licences has gone away. CleanRoom 3 doesn’t require VMware and the XDR licensing is now baked-in to your Predatar subscription.

New: Automated updates

CleanRoom 3.0 leverages continuous updates to ensure the platform remains secure, up-to-date, and optimised without requiring manual intervention. The system continuously downloads updates and enhancements from Predatar’s Git repository. This ensures that CleanRoom 3.0 is always equipped with the latest security improvements, malware definitions, and performance optimisations.

By automating the update process, CleanRoom 3.0 eliminates the need for manual updates by engineers, reducing the risk of human error, saving time, and ensuring that the system is always running the most current version.

Time to think again about CleanRooms?

If you think that achieving recovery assurance for your organisation is complicated, think again. With CleanRoom 3 from Predatar, you can bring automated, AI-powered recovery testing and malware interrogation to your existing storage environment in a matter of days.

Get started now. Find out more about Predatar, or book a demo.

At Predatar, we’ve just launched CleanRoom 3. Not only is our third-generation CleanRoom the most advanced cyber recovery cleanroom on the market, but it’s also the most accessible.

We believe that every organisation that relies on data can benefit from pre-emptive cyber recovery in a cleanroom. That’s why CleanRoom 3 has been redesigned from the ground up to make adoption of this important technology achievable for more businesses than ever before.

This short article highlights 3 reasons your organisation needs one.

What is a Cyber Recovery Cleanroom?

Before we talk about why you need a Cyber Recovery CleanRoom, let’s quickly cover what they are. A cleanroom is a secure environment where IT teams and/or cybersecurity teams can validate the integrity and recoverability of the data their business stores to ensure a clean and safe recovery.

If you are already familiar with the concept of cleanrooms, you might think that they’re only used in high-stakes, post-attack scenarios – but things have changed. Predatar has been leading the way with technology that enables continuous, pre-emptive data validation.

To take a deeper dive into cleanroom technology, read this article: A Guide to Cyber Recovery CleanRooms

Why do you need a Cyber Recovery Cleanroom?

The simple truth is there is only one reason you need a cyber recovery cleanroom, and that’s resilience. You might call it data resilience, cyber resilience, or more broadly – operational resilience. A cleanroom enables you to be ready to bounce back from a cyberattack (or any other data loss event).

But with so many new products and technologies promising to boost resilience, let’s dig in to why a cleanroom is a must-have component in your resiliency toolset.

 

Reason 1: You probably have malware in your backups

Few organisations would question the vital role backup & recovery plays for operational resilience. Backups are often recognised at the last line of defence against data loss events, including cyber attacks. Yet, surprisingly few organisations have steps in place to routinely check their backup data for viruses.

Here’s an eye-opening stat for you.

Predatar has discovered malware in the backups of 80% of its customers – that’s malware that had previously not been detected, and in some cases had the potential to cause serious damage.

Typically, Predatar customers are medium and large enterprises with extensive IT systems and robust cyber security capabilities, but even with best-in-class security tools such as firewalls, antivirus, EDR and XDR, malware can – and clearly does – still get into backups.

You can learn more about how malware infiltrates backups, the damage it can cause, and why immutability doesn’t solve the problem in this article: You probably have Malware in your backups

Implementing a cyber recovery cleanroom is the only way to continually interrogate and clean your data without impacting the performance of your production and backup systems, and crucially without putting your data at risk.

Reason 2: Downtime hurts

You could take a reactive approach to cyber recovery. This is common practice for cyber incident response in many organisations today.  With this approach, following containment of a cyber-attack, security and IT teams will work together to carry out forensic analysis of data as part of the data recovery process.

The big problem here is time. With business-critical systems offline, your organisation’s ability to function will be severely impacted. In fact, it’s common for businesses to go completely ‘dark’ following a serious data breach.

When systems are offline, every minute counts. But according to IBM’s most recent Cost of a Data Breach Report, 75% of businesses that had experienced an attack, took more than 100 days to fully recover. The same study reports that the average cost of a cyber attack to a business is now a massive $4.88 million(USD).

With a reactive approach to cyber recovery, the first step is often to procure the hardware and configure the tools required to analyse data at huge scale. This task alone can take weeks before validation at scale can even begin.
  
Once the process is underway, the next challenge is dealing with any infections or unrecoverable files that are discovered while in the middle of a high-pressure, high-stakes situation.

With a proactive approach, utilising a cyber recovery cleanroom for pre-emptive recovery assurance, when a crisis hits you’ll already know that your data is clean and recoverable. Of course, in a cyber incident scenario we strongly recommend re-validating all data before restoring it, but the great news is:

1. You will already have the hardware and tools configured: Essentially, your cleanroom can be utilised for post-attack validation .
2. The likelihood of finding issues with the data is vastly reduced: It will have been validated recently as part of a proactive validation cycle.

Reason 3: New regulations are coming

Not only is it good practice to test-drive your incident response – It’s quickly becoming a regulatory necessity.

A raft of regulatory frameworks is coming into force around the world with an emphasis on operational resilience – DORA (European Union), HIPPA (United States), FISMA (United States), PRA (United Kingdom) to name a few.

While today, these regulations mainly focus on finance, healthcare, and government organisations – it’s only a matter of time until regulators in other industries follow suit.

The direction of travel is clear. It will no longer be adequate for regulated organisations to have a plan, they will need to demonstrate the effectiveness of those plans.

Proactive cyber recovery in a cleanroom is a cost-effective way to continually demonstrate the effectiveness of data recovery plans.    

Recovery Assurance For All

Learn more about how Predatar has lowered the barriers to adoption and made pre-emptive, AI-powered Cyber Recovery a reality for more or businesses than ever before. Read the article: Recovery Assurance For All… with CleanRoom 3