whitepaper
Clean cyber recovery at scale
Every organization must build a cyber recovery program that holds under real attack conditions. This guide covers the elements needed to build a strong foundation with Commvault technology, including air-gapped protection with Commvault AirGap, Cleanpoint Identification to find last-known-good data across backups, and Commvault Cleanroom for isolated testing and staging — designed to help teams adopt the architecture, controls, and automation that can support predictable, clean cyber recovery at scale.
-
14x Leader in the Gartner MQ
-
FedRAMP High Authorized
-
SOC 2 Type II + ISO/IEC 27001
01 Executive summary
Recover clean data and systems. Recover trust.
Cyber attacks don’t just encrypt data—they compromise the recovery tools, identity systems, and backup infrastructure teams rely on to respond. Restoring operations cleanly requires more than reverting to a validated, clean recovery point, isolated staging environments, and coordinated runbooks that rebuild your most critical systems and data first.
This whitepaper covers the architectural, operational, and procedural controls organizations may consider when pursuing cyber resilience with Commvault Cloud: from Commvault AirGap and Cleanpoint Identification to Commvault Cleanroom and Identity Resilience capabilities. It offers a framework designed to support a cyber recovery program that can be tested regularly, executed under pressure, and validated before returning to production.
02 the challenge
Why Traditional Backup Falls Short
Organizations must responsibly manage protection, compliance, and governance of their data. But achieving sufficient protection requires secure processes and technologies that most backup solutions lack. With increased cloud adoption, data gets distributed further, expanding the attack surface and creating new risks that traditional approaches cannot address .
When cyber recovery gets real
Cyber attacks compromise data and recovery tools at once. Teams need clean recovery, proof of integrity, and controlled workflows to restore operations fast.
Recovery tools get targeted
Attackers don’t stop at production—they go after backup systems. If protected copies aren’t isolated and immutable, cyber recovery becomes guesswork.
Clean recovery can’t be proven
Backups may carry malware artifacts. Without validation, teams risk reinfection when restoring—then they’re back in incident response instead of recovery.
Too many restore points
You can have thousands of backups and still not know the last known clean version. Identifying Cleanpoints becomes a manual, high-stakes hunt.
Identity recovery stalls everything
When identity providers are compromised, access to mission-critical systems can be unavailable. Restoring identity early is required to rebuild safely.
Forensics slows recovery decisions
Recovery procedures often live in tribal knowledge. Without on-demand testing and standardized runbooks, recovery is slower, riskier, and less predictable.
Runbooks are rarely practiced
Recovery procedures often live in tribal knowledge. Without on-demand testing and standardized runbooks, recovery is slower, riskier, and less predictable.
03 the solution
Cyber recovery designed for validation
Commvault Cloud unifies threat detection, Cleanpoint Identification, and isolated recovery to help organizations build clean recovery workflows they can test, trust, validate, and execute.
Air-gapped, immutable recovery foundation
Commvault AirGap creates off-site, immutable, indelible copies—isolated from production—designed to help keep recovery tools available when attackers target backups.
AI-driven clean recovery selection
Threat Detection & Hunting plus Cleanpoint Identification and AI-assisted Synthetic Recovery pinpoint last-known-good data and reduce rollback across systems.
Cleanroom recovery with runbooks
Cleanroom provides an isolated environment to stage recoveries for validation or forensics, with runbooks, automation, identity protection, and security integrations to streamline incident response.
04 technical architecture
Commvault Cloud’s cyber resilience architecture integrates four control layers — air-gapped immutable copies of data, AI-enabled threat detection & hunting with automatic quarantine of compromised files, Cleanroom for isolated staging and forensics, and Cleanpoint Identification with Synthetic Recovery for composite clean recovery point assembly. Policy controls including Compliance Lock, MFA, MPA, and external key vault integration are designed to reinforce the recovery chain from detection through validated production restoration.
Security
Air-gapped, immutable, indelible backup copies (Commvault AirGap)
AI-enabled Threat Detection & Hunting with quarantine
MFA for admin access; MPA for restore and destructive actions
External key vault integration for encryption key lifecycle
Compliance Lock to prevent retention reduction or library deletion
Recovery
Commvault Cleanroom for testing, forensics, and recovery staging
Cleanpoint Identification plus AI-assisted Synthetic Recovery
Validate Restore scheduled mock restores for recoverability proof
3-2-1-1-0 copy strategy with verification and WORM locking
SIEM/SOAR integrations and Security IQ monitoring/alerts
05 Key Benefits
Detect: AI-enabled threat hunting
Scan protected data and VMs for malware/encryption signals, quarantine impacted content, and hunt with YARA rules or file hashes.
Isolate: Cleanroom recovery with runbooks
Spin up an on-demand, isolated cleanroom for testing, forensics, and staging—then standardize recovery steps with automation and runbooks.
Protect: Air-gapped immutable backups
Keep an off-site, isolated copy of data with immutability and indelibility to reduce risk when attackers target backup systems.
Recover: Cleanpoints with synthetic recovery
Cleanpoint Identification can help locate clean data across backups, while AI-assisted Synthetic Recovery to build a composite recovery point from the most recent validated files.
Orchestrate: SOAR-ready security integrations
Ingest security-stack signals and orchestrate response and recovery through SOAR platforms like Microsoft Sentinel, Palo Alto Networks XSOAR, and Falcon Fusion.
Restore: Identity protection and auditing
Recover identity providers with granular or full forest recovery, audit privilege changes, and reverse unauthorized modifications to restore controlled access.
06 Compliance & Certifications
Certifications that help validate governance for cyber recovery and clean recovery programs.
FedRAMP High Authorized
Commvault Cloud for Government authorization for high-impact U.S. federal workloads.
SOC 2 Type II
Independent audit of security controls and operational effectiveness over time.
ISO/IEC 27001:2013
Certified information security management system (ISMS) for risk-based security governance.
FIPS 140-3 / FIPS 140-2
Validated cryptographic modules used to protect sensitive data.
IRAP PROTECTED + NIST 800-53 alignment
Controls alignment for regulated environments and government frameworks.
07 Conclusion
When a cyberattack collapses trust in data and infrastructure, recovery must be controlled, validated, and executed in a sequence that restores your most critical systems, apps, and data—your minimum viability—first. Commvault Cloud offers air-gapped copies, Cleanpoint-validated recovery points, and Cleanroom isolation designed to support clean rebuilds, along with runbooks, integrations, and testing cadences that can help make clean recovery repeatable and demonstrable under real incident pressure.
Schedule a Live Demo
See cyber recovery in action: isolate recovery, identify Cleanpoints, validate restores, and stage clean recovery to an on-demand Cleanroom environment.
Request demo
Talk to an Expert
Align on minimum viability, identity protection, air-gapped copies, and runbooks so your teams can execute predictable, clean recovery under incident response pressure.
Chat now08 FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
What does this whitepaper cover?
It outlines architectural, operational, and procedural controls to fortify Commvault environments with defense-in-depth—spanning infrastructure hardening, identity and access control, encryption, immutability, and recovery preparedness for clean recovery.
How is cyber recovery different?
Cyber recovery restores trust, not just systems. The focus must be clean recovery. Commvault Cloud helps organizations with this mandate by offering technologies designed to isolate recovery operations, recover data from an immutable, indelible copy, and scan and validate that data and workloads appear to be free of malware before restoring to production.
How does Cleanroom testing help?
A Cleanroom provides an isolated environment for recovery staging, testing, and forensics. You can practice full-stack recovery of Tier 0/1 systems, validate cleanliness, and build operational muscle memory without affecting production. Commvault Cleanroom is designed to help IT and security teams build processes and automations that can reduce manual efforts during a recovery test. This includes infrastructure setup and system configuration.
Automations, paired with the fact that Cleanroom is an isolated and on-demand environment, can allow teams to play out a full-scale cyber recovery, including the ability to validate that apps and data function and could be recovered if needed. This validation can also help executive teams the confidence that if—and when—they need to recover, it has been practiced and tested.
What is Cleanpoint Identification and Synthetic Recovery?
Commvault Threat Scan includes technologies designed to help organizations recover and validate clean data, a capability that can be critical during a cyber recovery.
Cleanpoint Identification can help pinpoint clean data across backups. Synthetic Recovery can assemble a composite recovery point by combining the most recent Cleanpoint-validated versions of files, while only discarding corrupted or compromised data, which may reduce data rollback while quarantining data at risk.
Together, these technologies can help address the challenge of having to go far back in time to recover a complete clean backup (and losing good data between then and now), or simply recovering from the latest backup (knowing that it might be compromised).
How do you protect identity first?
Identity providers are often the first systems required for access to everything else. The approach is to protect and recover identity with granular options, plus auditing to detect attacker changes and reverse privilege escalation during incident response. Commvault Cloud includes the ability to back up and recover your identity provider (IdP) such as Microsoft Active Directory, Entra ID, or Okta.
How do we operationalize secure recovery?
Commvault Cloud enables governance and access controls such as Compliance Lock, MFA, and MPA for high-impact actions. The platform also provides automations, runbooks, monitoring, and regular validation tests designed to support predictable, controlled clean recovery.
Explore related resources
Dive deeper into Cyber Resilience best practices
Cyber Recovery for Your Resilience
Ransomware Trends for 2026: AI, Resilience, and Mean Time to Clean Recovery
