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:
- You will already have the hardware and tools configured: Essentially, your cleanroom can be utilised for post-attack validation .
- 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
