Key Takeaways
- “Instant restore” claims often break down at scale due to real-world I/O operations per second (IOPS), rehydration, and infrastructure constraints.
- Mass live mounts on deduplicated backup storage can cause performance collapse, forcing slow rehydration back to primary storage.
- Cleanrooms help enables parallel forensic investigation and business recovery instead of serial, delay-driven downtime.
- Identity compromise expands the blast radius, making isolated recovery and Active Directory (AD) restoration critical to secure operations.
- Automated cleanroom runbooks and repeatable testing help organizations validate real recovery metrics before a crisis occurs.
Let’s start with a quick story about a “ransomware‑proof” environment that took 72 hours to recover, way beyond the organization’s expectations for recovery time objective. It is exactly the kind of situation where Commvault’s Cleanroom Recovery could have helped turn a painful, three‑day outage into a faster, more controlled recovery with less risk.
War Story: Physics vs. Marketing
On Reddit, a user shared how the financial services firm they work for was hit by a breach. They assumed they had a “dream stack” for quick recovery (but can you really have a “dream stack” without Cleanroom Recovery?): immutable backups, secure storage snapshots, and a modern hypervisor. The datasheets promised “instant mass restore,” yet the business sat offline for three days while everyone tried to drag their environment back to life.
The root cause was not that backups failed, but that the real‑world physics of rehydration, forensics, and identity were never tested at scale. The original poster mentioned that having access to a cleanroom environment would have sped up the process. Let’s dig into this further and address why.
Commvault’s Cleanroom Recovery is designed to address exactly these weak points: It helps automate clean, isolated recovery into the cloud, validates data, and orchestrates recovery in a way that aligns with how incidents actually unfold, not just how diagrams look on slides.
Problem 1: The Rehydration Trap
In the story, “live mounting” a handful of virtual machines (VMs) worked fine, but trying to live mount hundreds crushed the backup appliance. The random I/O running directly on deduplicated, compressed backup storage collapsed the IOPS, forcing the team to rehydrate everything back to primary Non-Volatile Memory Express at about 3 TB/hour for roughly 100 TB of data.
Commvault Cleanroom Recovery helps recover workloads into an isolated Azure‑based cleanroom built on scalable cloud compute and storage instead of trying to run production at scale off a backup appliance.
This allows you to restore critical VMs into a purpose‑built recovery environment, use cloud elasticity to absorb I/O, and automate the recovery sequence so the right systems (identity, core apps, critical data) come up first without bottlenecking on a single backup target.
Problem 2: The Forensic Drag
In the audit, the tech stack was ready in about four hours, but legal delayed touching anything for 72 hours because they had no pre‑provisioned cleanroom. Without an isolated environment with zero routes back to production, the forensics team could not safely investigate while the business recovered, so everyone waited for the all-clear before starting any real restore.
Cleanroom Recovery provides an on-demand, isolated recovery environment explicitly built for simultaneous recovery and forensic analysis. You can spin up a fenced cleanroom in Azure in hours, recover systems into it, and let security and legal teams perform read‑only forensics and threat scanning while operations validates applications and prepares for cutover – dramatically shrinking “forensic drag” as a contributor to downtime.
Problem 3: Identity Blast Radius
The environment in the story had a single admin account with access to both the hypervisor and backup console, which meant if attackers pivoted that far, immutability could become just another setting they flipped off. Identity, not just data, was the real blast radius problem.
Cleanroom Recovery is designed to help reduce dependency on the compromised production identity plane during recovery, allowing isolated access and planned support for AD restoration in the cleanroom.
By recovering identity services into an isolated cleanroom and using separate, least‑privilege access paths, you can help validate AD, help enforce proper authorizations, and help protect backup control planes from being trivially compromised by the same credentials that were used in production.
How Cleanroom Recovery Would Change This Story
If this customer had used Cleanroom Recovery, their recovery story could have been very different.
- Faster, physics‑aware recovery: They could have helped orchestrate recovery into a cloud cleanroom with scalable storage and compute, avoiding the IOPS collapse of mass live mounts and pushing toward the recovery velocity they actually needed.
- Parallel forensics and business recovery: A pre‑defined cleanroom RTO of under four hours would have helped them spin up a fenced environment for both forensic work and application validation instead of waiting 72 hours in a holding pattern.
- Reduced reinfection and identity risk: Cleanroom isolation, threat scanning, and a separate control plane would have helped limit identity blast radius, helped confirm data was malware‑free before returning to production, and helped give auditors and insurers a clean, verifiable recovery trail.
- Automated, repeatable playbooks: Automated runbooks orchestrating clean point detection, workload sequencing, and test failovers could have helped them regularly rehearse this scenario and know their real‑world metrics before an attack – not learned them during a crisis.
For organizations that already invest in “ransomware‑proof” stacks, the missing piece is often not more features but a cleanroom strategy that respects physics, identity, and legal reality. Commvault Cleanroom Recovery is designed to close that gap and help turn recovery from a three‑day war story into a controlled, provable, and much faster operation.
FAQs
Q: Why did the “instant mass restore” approach fail in the ransomware scenario?
A: While live mounting a few VMs worked, scaling to hundreds overwhelmed the backup appliance due to I/O constraints. Deduplicated and compressed backup storage is not designed to handle full production workloads at scale, leading to performance collapse and delayed recovery.
Q: What is the “rehydration trap” in disaster recovery?
A: The rehydration trap occurs when organizations must restore large volumes of compressed backup data back to primary storage before systems can operate normally. This process is limited by throughput rates, which can dramatically extend recovery times when dealing with tens or hundreds of terabytes.
Q: How does a cleanroom help reduce forensic-related downtime?
A: A cleanroom provides an isolated environment where forensic teams can safely investigate while IT simultaneously restores systems. This parallel approach helps eliminate long waiting periods for legal or security approval before beginning recovery efforts.
Q: Why is identity such a critical factor in ransomware recovery?
A: If attackers compromise administrative credentials tied to both production and backup systems, immutability controls may no longer provide protection. Isolated identity recovery and least-privilege access can help limit blast radius and support a safer restoration process.
Q: How does Cleanroom Recovery help improve recovery orchestration?
A: Cleanroom Recovery helps automates workload sequencing, cleanpoint validation, and cloud-based recovery infrastructure provisioning. This structured approach aligns recovery with how incidents actually unfold, helping organizations regain control faster and with greater confidence.
Q: What is the strategic lesson for organizations with “ransomware-proof” stacks?
A: Advanced features alone do not guarantee fast recovery. A cleanroom strategy that accounts for infrastructure physics, identity isolation, and legal realities helps enable organizations to turn theoretical resilience into measurable, repeatable recovery performance.
Nico Guerrera is Senior Solutions Marketing Manager at Commvault.
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