What is an isolated recovery environment (clean room), and how do you build one?

Why you need somewhere clean to land

After an attack, production is a crime scene and a hazard. Restoring a candidate recovery point straight into it risks reinfecting everything if the point is not actually clean, and it destroys the forensic evidence you may need. A clean room gives you a safe place to restore, inspect and prove a point before you let it near the business.

What makes it isolated

• Network separation. Segmented or air-gapped from production and the internet, so nothing can spread and nothing can beacon out.
• Independent identity. Its own directory and DNS, so you are not trusting the very Active Directory the attacker may have compromised.
• No trust to production. No domain trust, shared credentials or open paths back to the environment you are recovering.
• Controlled data path in. A one-way, deliberate route from immutable copies, not an open pipe.
• Locked egress. Outbound traffic is denied by default so malware cannot call home during validation.

What goes in it

• A minimal identity and DNS stack to authenticate the systems you restore.
• The candidate clean-point restores you are validating.
• Scanning and anomaly tooling to confirm the point is malware free.
• A validation harness that checks services, data integrity and real functionality.

How to build one

1. Provision isolated infrastructureStand up a segregated on-premises segment or an isolated cloud environment such as a dedicated VPC or a government cloud enclave for regulated workloads.
2. Establish independent identity and DNSGive the clean room its own authentication so it never depends on production identity.
3. Create a controlled path from immutable copiesDefine a one-way route from your air-gapped and immutable copies into the clean room, with no path back to production.
4. Add scanning and validation toolingBring in the tools that prove a point is clean and that recovered systems are healthy and functional.
5. Predefine runbooks and success criteriaDecide in advance what you restore, in what order, and what counts as a pass.
6. Make it repeatableTreat the clean room as something you can rebuild on demand for every test and every incident, not a fragile one-off you are afraid to touch.

On-premises or cloud

On-premises clean rooms give you full control and can meet strict data-residency needs. Cloud clean rooms give you elastic, isolated capacity you can spin up for a test and tear down after, which keeps the environment fresh and the cost occasional. Regulated and public-sector workloads often land in a government cloud enclave for the isolation and compliance boundary it provides.

How KELYN makes this operational

KELYN designs and operates isolated recovery on Commvault, including in Commvault GovCloud, as the first MSP for that environment and Commvault Federal Partner of the Year. The clean room is where a recovery point earns trust, and KELYN builds it so you can validate cleanly and rebuild it whenever you need to test.

Sources

• Commvault Cyber Recovery Readiness research with GigaOm ↗