After a cyberattack, restoring straight back into production can reinfect the environment. A clean room gives you a safe, isolated place to recover, inspect and validate first — and Commvault offers this as part of its platform.
What a clean room is
A clean room is an isolated recovery environment, often provisioned in the cloud on demand, where you can recover systems from known-good copies without exposing them to the compromised network.
How organizations use it
- Regular recovery testing without touching production.
- Forensic investigation on recovered copies.
- Rebuilding critical services in a trusted environment after an incident.
Making it work in practice
Clean-room recovery depends on good inputs: immutable, isolated backup copies, a defined list of critical applications and a runbook that sequences dependencies such as identity, DNS and databases.
A typical clean-room recovery sequence
- Declare the incident and freeze changes to backup policies.
- Provision the clean room and its isolated network.
- Recover identity and core infrastructure services first.
- Restore critical applications and data from the last validated clean point.
- Scan and validate before granting user access or reconnecting to production.
Running this sequence as a scheduled exercise — not just during an incident — is what turns a clean room from a feature into a capability. Each test should be timed, documented and compared with your recovery-time objectives.
Key takeaways
- A clean room prevents reinfection during recovery.
- It doubles as a safe environment for routine recovery tests.
- Success depends on clean copies and a well-sequenced runbook.
Want an independent view of your recoverability?
Book a Recovery Readiness Call and we’ll help you turn assumptions into evidence.
