Your Modern Playbook for Rapid Response and Clean Recovery

You’re a cybersecurity leader in your company. It’s 6:30 pm on a Friday before a long weekend. Just as you are about to board a plane for vacation with your family, your phone rings – it’s your SecOps team. Your IT systems around the world are starting to go unresponsive, and there are indications that you’re under a ransomware attack.

In that moment, the difference between chaos and control comes down to these key factors: how fast you respond and how cleanly you recover. A swift reaction might contain the damage. But if your recovery reintroduces infected data, you’re right back where you started.

Traditional backup and recovery strategies no longer work when staring down today’s threats. Organizations need a plan that pairs real-time threat detection with clean, validated recovery. This is the foundation of true cyber resilience. The equation is simple but powerful: Commvault® Cloud Threat Scan + Cleanroom™ Recovery = Cyber Confidence.

Ransomware actors are becoming more sophisticated while organizations struggle to keep up. According to research from 2024, the fastest detection-to-impact time was 27 minutes. That means it’s possible your organization will have less than half an hour‌ ‌from the first warning to potential system-wide paralysis. 

In this high-stakes scenario, every minute matters. Each delay increases the risks for data loss, extended downtime, regulatory nightmares, and erosion of customer trust. In this playbook, we’ll show how Commvault helps you move from reactive recovery to confident, orchestrated response.

What Happens After the Alarm?

When a cyberattack strikes, detection is just the beginning. The real test lies in what comes next: recovery. In theory, backups should be your safety net. But in practice, they can become silent carriers of infection. Since most bad actors target your data, restoring backups blindly carries inherent risks such as reintroducing malware into your environment. 

That’s why modern recovery spots clean points for restore. It needs Threat Scan.

Threat Scan: Your Clean Data Recovery Wingman

Commvault Cloud Threat Scan helps you to recover and restore clean data quickly, expertly avoiding threats and allowing you to automatically quarantine potentially malicious data. But what exactly is “malicious data”? And how can we tell if data is clean?

Rather than treating every backup as trustworthy, Threat Scan continuously analyzes data backups to surface hidden threats. It uses anomaly detection, malware scanning, encryption analysis, and third-party signals to classify recovery points with a high degree of confidence.

Here are the core features of Threat Scan:

• Anomaly detection: Customers generally backup their data periodically. Some may do it daily, whereas some might do it every other week. Threat Scan monitors for unusual patterns in backup activity‌ – ‌such as unexpected spikes in data volume, off-hour backup jobs, or sudden changes in data types. These anomalies often serve as early indicators of compromise.
  
• Encryption detection: A core pillar of Threat Scan is its advanced capability to detect data encrypted by ransomware. The system analyzes file metadata and randomness patterns to identify signs of malicious encryption.
  
  Unlike traditional methods that rely solely on entropy, Threat Scan uses deeper file composition analysis to distinguish between legitimate encryption and ransomware activity. Trained on diverse datasets and encryption behaviors, it delivers fast detection with reduced false positives – even for emerging, zero-day threats.
  
• Root-cause tracing and integrated malware scanning: Threat Scan doesn’t stop at detection – it traces infected files back to their source, helping teams isolate patient zero and understand the scope of the attack. This infecting file, also known as the source of encryption, is detected with the help of integrated industry-leading antivirus solutions. 
  
• Third-party security ecosystem integration: Integrations with partners like CrowdStrike, Darktrace, Cisco, and Netskope allow Commvault to capture incidents from external security platforms and flag associated devices or data as being vulnerable. These captured events are then shown on the Commvault platform against the assets or resources where the incident was generated. This tightens the feedback loop between detection and recovery.
  
• Restore classification while backing up: As backups are created, data is automatically labeled as clean or compromised, forming a real-time recovery timeline. This helps enable teams to confidently select the right point to restore from‌.

Integration with SIEM & SOAR for Full Automation

In a true rapid-response scenario, speed and precision are integral to the safety of an organization’s invaluable data. Similarly, each event on the recovery journey from anomaly detection to infection identification is essential from a security standpoint.

Hence, Commvault provides the capability to share these critical security events with the security operations (SecOps) teams through SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) integrations and perform actions with SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) integrations. 

First, as Threat Scan detects anomalies‌ – ‌malware, encryption events, or suspicious backup behaviors‌ – ‌it immediately sends security events to these platforms via dedicated connectors (SIEM and webhooks).

Next, through integrations with powerful SOAR platforms such as Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, and Palo Alto Networks XSOAR, Commvault allows SecOps to gain actionable intelligence and automate response workflows using preconfigured playbooks (co-developed with Commvault) to take action‌ – ‌quarantining infected data, preserving backup versions, or triggering recovery workflows‌.

Cleanroom Recovery

Cleanroom Recovery is an on-demand secure and isolated environment for organizations to prepare, validate, and execute cyber recovery – delivering continuous business. With Cleanroom Recovery, organizations can confidently test cyber recovery plans, conduct secure forensic analysis, and deliver production recovery to help achieve continuous business following an attack.

When it comes to restoring data, especially in production environments, even “clean” isn’t clean enough. Despite already being marked as clean or compromised, customers still will want their own security teams to analyze the data and run the desired forensics.

With the latest integration, Threat Scan in Cleanroom Recovery now delivers post-recovery threat detection, analysis, and clean recovery. This will help boost the confidence of security and IT teams that they can recover after a cyber incident.

Think of it as two-factor verification in data recovery. Cleanroom Recovery gives your team a chance to validate the data again post-recovery. Only when the team is confident in the cleanliness of their data does the data move forward into production‌ – helping deliver not just a fast recovery, but a clean one.

Orchestrating a Fast and Confident Recovery

When each second matters and the future of your organization is at stake, confidence is everything. Commvault’s recovery orchestration doesn’t just restore data; it does it intelligently and safely. With AI-enabled scans of metadata and file entropy, the platform automatically quarantines suspicious files and pinpoints the last known good copy. This means teams don’t waste precious hours guessing‌ – ‌they restore what’s clean, fast.

What’s more, the business impact is undeniable. Commvault’s sophisticated solution helps reduce downtime, improving confidence in recoveries and preventing the reinfection of their environments. 

This is what modern cyber resilience looks like: fast threat detection, isolated environments for testing and staging recoveries, and automations to help your teams quickly recover following attacks.