Introduction
In this increasingly digital world, data loss can have devastating consequences for organizations. This ranges everything from outages and natural disasters to cyberattacks, and can result in inaccessible systems and lost data. These disruptions can result in significant operational disruption, financial losses, legal repercussions, and irreparable damage to reputation and customer trust.
Cyberattacks pose a significant risk for organizations of all sizes and industries. Now, organizations not only need to enhance their cyber defenses, they have to focus on proactively improving their recovery plans and procedures too. According to the Veeam 2024 Ransomware Trends report, 63% of organizations restored backups directly back into their production environment without employing some type of quarantine or scanning method during recovery. This is where clean room data recovery shines. Clean room data recovery is conducted in controlled “clean” environments to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data, which makes it an invaluable asset for IT organizations.
What is a Clean Room?
Clean rooms serve as isolated data environments that are specifically designed to verify and recover data from backups, and they ensure that your data recovery processes are both malware-free and secure from cyberattacks. By maintaining clean rooms that are isolated from production environments at the network level, organizations can create a virtual air gap which effectively prevents unauthorized access and enhances data security.
What is Clean Room Data Recovery?
The concept of clean room data recovery revolves around the process of recovering data within an isolated, controlled environment that’s specifically designed for verifying data before restoring it back to a production environment. Since dwell time can vary depending on the ransomware group or threat actor, this is one of the most important steps that organizations should not skip over. This ensures that your recovered data is free of malware or other malicious artifacts that could have been planted over time. Clean room data recovery must also include automated processes to facilitate testing and full recovery since the primary goal is to prevent the reintroduction of malicious or contaminated data.
Key characteristics of clean room data recovery include maintaining an isolated environment with separate networks, storage, hardware, and software. Additionally, secure access controls are crucial, employing least privilege principles is important for limiting accessibility, and monitoring and audited access helps ensure security.
Use Cases and Benefits of Clean Room Data Recovery
Cyberattack recovery: Clean rooms serve as a trusted source for clean recovery while having infected and compromised production environments. Restoring from clean restore points reduces the risk of reinfection.
Secure forensic investigation: Isolated environments are ideal for forensic analysis of infected systems or data. Once indicators of compromise (IoC) or malicious software are identified, isolated fix testing and resolution can take place before a clean recovery.
Security patch testing: Test security vulnerability exploits and patches without disrupting your production systems. Once fixes are fully tested in clean rooms, there’s more certainty for successful deployment in your production environments.
Recovery testing: Ensure your systems and applications can be successfully recovered by testing backup recovery in a secure, isolated environment without impacting your production systems.
Quarantine: Place your recovered data in a clean room until all testing and verification is complete and there are no signs of infection with malware or other malicious software.
IT sandbox: An isolated environment is ideal for IT operations to test new patches and updates before they are rolled out across production environments. Clean room data recovery streamlines and automates the process of deploying restored data to production environments too.
Overall, clean room data recovery significantly enhances security by preventing the reintroduction of threats and accelerating recovery from ransomware attacks. It also provides IT teams with a trusted recovery source to ensure that data integrity is maintained. Additionally, clean room data recovery supports regulatory compliance by securing private or sensitive data, making it an indispensable component of modern data protection strategies.
Implementing a Clean Room Data Recovery Environment
Setting up clean room data recovery is essential for security, testing, recovery, and more. It is important to emphasize isolation, and the following is an outline of recommended steps you should take to set up clean rooms.
Resource allocation: Clean rooms require additional resources, including CPU and memory consumption. This is a crucial consideration, as it ensures you have the capacity to efficiently process backups and recoveries.
Logs management: Every event, especially recovery verification, is written to log files. Be sure to consider the allocation and partitions where your logs are going to be stored. Keep log files for a predetermined amount of time to make sure you have the information you need for future audits or troubleshooting.
Network configuration: Clean rooms must be fully fenced off from production environments while mirroring the network configuration of your production environment. For instance, if virtual machines (VMs) in your production environment are in two logical networks, the clean room environment should also have two networks. This ensures that the VMs in the clean room function just as they would in your production environment.
IP addressing: If clean room environments have the same IP addresses as in the production network, your clean room data recovery processes can operate as if they were in the production environment, which ensures accurate testing and verification.
Access controls: By implementing strict access controls that combine physical, software, and procedural measures, organizations can maintain the integrity of their clean rooms. Access should be limited as much as possible and adhere to the least-privilege zero trust principle.
Following these recommendations ensures that your clean room provides a secure and isolated environment for testing and recovery, thereby keeping your production systems unaffected by malware.
Best Practices for Effective Clean Room Data Recovery
As with most IT and security processes, there are industry recommendations and best practices that, if followed, could allow you to ensure effective and secure clean room data recovery.
Planning and readiness: Document your processes and chain of custody for data backups and recovery, including storage and transfer destinations. Define the tooling and personnel required and identify potential risks and document mitigation options. Periodically adjust your recovery protocols based on new threats and technology updates.
Clean soom setup: Isolate physical access only to authorized personnel and implement secure access controls such as tokens and biometric authentication. Always set up your clean rooms separately from production networks and environments.
Data integrity: Encrypt data in transit and at rest and automate data verification for encryption errors or corruption. Always scan for malware, viruses, or other malicious software too. Your data can also be validated against original hashes or signatures.
Staff enablement: Train your personnel on clean room data recovery procedures. Keep documentation and training up to date and ensure staff understand risks. Be ready for internal or external audits and be sure your staff monitors clean rooms and data recovery.
Compliance: Adhere to industry standards and regulations for data protection, data recovery, forensic analysis, and privacy laws. It’s also important to obtain lab accreditation certifications for personnel, IT, and security.
How Veeam Supports Clean Room Data Recovery
Having discussed the various use cases and benefits of clean room data recovery, it’s now time to delve into Veeam Data Platform. For over 14 years, Veeam has been offering and continuously enhancing this technology. Known within Veeam Data Platform as DataLabs, this Veeam Data Platform feature provides the functionality you need to create clean rooms — a.k.a. isolated virtual environments that are equipped with Veeam Backup & Replication capabilities, including Veeam Recovery Orchestrator.
The clean room includes Veeam SureBackup verification procedures, SureReplica function, U-AIR recovery, On-Demand Sandbox functionality, Secure Restore, and Staged Restore, which automatically cleans infected environments in clean rooms before restoring into production. Veeam was the first in the market to have Secure and Staged Restore functionality and most importantly, Veeam Recovery Orchestrator helps organizations document recovery plans to validate service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure their cyber recovery strategy is kept up to date and can be easily verified.
The clean room setup also incorporates a proxy appliance to facilitate connections between the production environment and the virtual lab. Additionally, it includes a virtual router and a suite of features that establish the Veeam Data Platform as a market leader in clean room data recovery functionality. Some of key features include:
Coverage for any protection method: With Veeam, one of the advantages of clean rooms is the ability to recover for any protection method, including any type of backup file, storage snapshot, replica, or continuous data protection (CDP) replica.
Advanced clean room isolation: Veeam offers advanced single-host isolation settings for clean rooms. With Veeam Backup & Replication and a single wizard, users can create several virtual networks for their clean room. The number of virtual networks corresponds to the number of production networks to which verified VMs are connected. Networks in clean rooms or virtual labs are mapped to production networks.
Infrastructure agnostic: Users can create clean rooms in infrastructure that fits any budget or IT policy. Clean rooms can be set up on any digital infrastructure, either on-premises or in the cloud.
Security scans and YARA rules engine: The YARA engine allows recognition of complex threats through customizable rules, allowing you to quickly flag suspicious files and behaviors. Clean room backups are verified to detect malware with Veeam Threat Hunter signature-based scans that can detect millions of malware strains and ensure clean data recovery.
Advanced and automated full recoverability testing: With SureBackup and Secure Restore, full recoverability testing includes malware detection scans and pre-built recovery verification tests. VM heartbeat and ping tests are also available with additional verifications, and this functionality extends standard CRC or VM boot tests. Organizations can test at scale by including multiple workloads into their cyber recovery plan, including pre-built tests for VMs or their own custom steps.
Conclusion
Clean room data recovery is an essential process for maintaining data integrity and security, especially in the face of cyberattacks and other data loss scenarios. This process involves recovering data within isolated, controlled environments known as clean rooms, or in the case of Veeam Data Platform, DataLabs. These environments are designed to provide malware-free backups and ensure isolation from cyberattacks, thereby safeguarding the integrity and confidentiality of your recovered data.
With Veeam Data Platform and its clean room recovery functionality, organizations can be confident that they have the necessary technology and capabilities they need to recover from cyberattacks or any other contingencies.
The post Clean Room Data Recovery: Enhancing Security and Data Integrity appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.
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