By Rick Norgate, CEO, Predatar.
I spend a lot of my time talking to vendors, partners and customers across the storage, security and business continuity ecosystems. Different roles, different priorities, but the same conversation keeps coming up. At some point, Clean Rooms enter the discussion and almost without fail I hear a version of the same response… “We love the idea… but Clean Rooms are expensive.”
Not All Clean Rooms Are Created Equal
Not only is the perception not universally true, but there’s another layer to it as well. Ask ten people what a “Clean Room” is and you’ll get ten different answers. For some it’s about detection, for others it’s isolation, or a last resort recovery space. The reality is not all Clean Rooms are equal, and a lot of the confusion in the market comes from that.
The Industry Created This Problem
To be fair, the perception around cost didn’t come from nowhere. The industry has, over time, shaped it. The industry has tied Clean Rooms to heavy, hardware led approaches, large deployments, dedicated infrastructure and significant upfront investment before you see any value.
Traditional solutions such as the Dell Cyber Recovery Vault is a good example of where that thinking comes from. They are built around sizeable hardware estates and focus on encryption detection at scale, identifying when ransomware has started encrypting data. That has real value, but it also tells you something important. By the time you are detecting encryption, the attack is already in motion. You are reacting, not proving anything and you have likely already invested heavily just to get there.
Costs Are Making It Worse
Fast forward to 2026 and the situation is getting tougher. Hardware costs have jumped significantly, with increases of up to 50% not uncommon. So the mental equation becomes even harder to justify. People see Clean Rooms as valuable, but expensive, complex, and something to come back to later.
But that is not what a Clean Room should be.
The Only Question That Matters
When I speak to customers, especially security and business continuity teams, very few are asking for better detection tools. What they really want to know is much simpler.
“If we get hit, can we recover? Not in theory, not based on a report, but for real. Can we recover quickly, cleanly, and completely?”
That is the problem that matters, and it is the problem we set out to solve with Predatar CleanRoomTM, our Isolated Recovery Environment.
Proving Recovery Changes Everything
Instead of waiting for something bad to happen, the Predatar approach is to continuously prove that recovery works. We automatically recover backups and primary snapshots into isolation, test whether those systems come back clean and usable and scan for malware as part of that process. You do not need any manual effort to kick this off. We run fully automated restore testing at scale across both primary and secondary data and we do it in a completely vendor agnostic way.
That combination matters. It means you are not tied to a single backup platform or storage vendor, and you are not relying on periodic, manual testing that may or may not happen. You are continuously validating your ability to recover across your actual estate.
What You Find When You Actually Test
And when organisations start doing this properly, something interesting happens. They do not just gain confidence in recovery, they uncover risks they did not know existed. Dormant malware, planted threats, things that have not triggered yet but would have eventually. Across our customer base, 93% have found malware sitting in their backups. These are not organisations in the middle of an attack. These are organisations doing the right thing, testing and validating and still finding hidden exposure.
Why Cost Still Dominates the Conversation
So why does cost still dominate the conversation? Because most people still believe Clean Rooms require a huge upfront commitment. Big hardware, big rollout, big decision. And when something feels that significant, it gets delayed. I see it all the time, projects pushed into next year, endless scoping exercises, teams waiting for the right moment. But resilience doesn’t work like that. You do not get to choose when you need it.
A Clean Room Without the Hardware Burden
This is exactly why we took a different approach with Predatar. We deliver the Predatar CleanRoom as a virtual appliance. You can deploy it into your existing environment, whether that is your virtual platform, repurposed hardware or simply spare capacity you already have. In fact, over 70% of our customers deploy using resources they already own, with no new hardware investment required. What used to be a capital heavy decision becomes an operational one, and that changes how organisations approach it.
Start Small and Scale When You’re Ready
Many teams assume that if they adopt a Clean Room, they have to do everything at once. In reality, the most successful organisations start small. They focus on what matters most, a minimum viable business service, a critical application, or a subset of their environment such as key VMware workloads. They prove recovery there first and then expand over time. There is no need for a big bang rollout or an all in commitment from day one.
One View Across a Fragmented Estate
Another challenge many organisations face is fragmentation. Multiple backup platforms, multiple storage systems, and multiple tools all trying to answer the same question in slightly different ways. Can we recover? Predatar works across backups and primary snapshots, across vendors and platforms, to give you a single, consistent view of recovery confidence.
The Real Barrier Isn’t Technology
If there is one thing I have learned from these conversations, it is this: perception, not technology, is the biggest barrier to adopting Clean Rooms. If people believe they are expensive, complex, and hardware-heavy, they will keep putting them off. But when we redefine them as something lightweight, flexible, and focused on proving recovery, the conversation changes very quickly.
It All Comes Down to One Question
Because in the end, resilience is not about how fast you detect a problem. It is about what happens next. Can you recover quickly, cleanly, and completely?
That is the only question that really matters, and it is one the industry needs to get better at answering.
If you are having the same conversations and want to challenge the assumptions around Clean Rooms, we would welcome the discussion. Drop us a line.
