Over the past few years, several leading backup vendors have popularised the idea of the Cloud Clean Room.
On paper, it’s compelling.
You spin up an isolated environment in the cloud. The provider handles the infrastructure. You bring in your backup data, start analysing it, and try to figure out what’s clean and what’s compromised.
It’s fast to deploy. Convenient. And when you’re in the middle of an incident, that simplicity matters.
But there’s a catch, actually there are a few.
First, your data has to be in the cloud. If it isn’t already, you’re now dealing with transfer times, bandwidth constraints, and inevitably cost. Egress charges alone can turn a bad day into an expensive one.
Second, these environments are fundamentally reactive. They’re built for after the attack. A forensic lab to investigate what happened and piece together a recovery plan.
And third, they tend to be vendor-specific. If your world includes multiple backup platforms or even primary storage snapshots, you may find yourself limited. One clean room, one ecosystem.
Convenient? Yes. Flexible? Not always.
A different approach: the on-prem (and everywhere) Clean Room
Now flip the perspective.
What if the clean room wasn’t something you scrambled to build after an incident… but something you were already using before one?
Instead of being tied to a single cloud or vendor, it’s deployable anywhere, on-prem, in a colo, or in the cloud. It arrives as a simple OVA and plugs into a wide range of backup and storage platforms.
But the real shift isn’t where it runs. It’s how it’s used.
This is a proactive clean room.
Rather than waiting for an attack, it continuously tests your ability to recover. Not just “does the backup exist?”, but “can I restore this data quickly, cleanly, and completely?”
That’s Recovery Assurance.
And it changes the conversation.
Proof, not promises
Most backup vendors will tell you your data is safe.
Predatar takes a different stance: Prove it.
Because it’s vendor-agnostic, it’s not marking its own homework. It’s independently validating whether your recovery actually works across all your backup tools, not just one.
There’s also an unexpected side effect.
When you’re testing recovery daily, you start to see things.
Dormant threats. Hidden artifacts. Things that slipped past production security tools.
At the time of writing, 93% of Predatar customers have discovered malware in their backups, including ransomware payloads, ransomware notes, and spyware that went undetected elsewhere.
That’s not just recovery testing. That’s early warning.
So, which is better?
It’s not a simple “this vs that.”
Cloud Clean Rooms are fast, accessible, and useful in the heat of an incident. They give you a place to investigate when things have already gone wrong.
But they’re reactive, tied to specific vendors, and dependent on cloud data logistics.
Predatar’s CleanRoomTM, on the other hand, is about readiness. It’s flexible, vendor-agnostic, and designed to answer a big question before disaster strikes…
“Can we recover – right now – without surprises?”
The real takeaway
In a ransomware event, time is everything.
Cloud Clean Rooms help you respond. Proactive Clean Rooms help you not panic in the first place.
And if you can walk into that 2:17am moment already knowing your data is clean and recoverable?
That’s not just resilience. That’s true Recovery Assurance.
