Isolated recovery environment (clean room)

Recovering from a cyber attack isn't always as simple as restoring backups. Before systems return to production, your teams need confidence that applications, services and data are safe, clean and ready to use.

Having access to an isolated recovery environment, also known as a clean room, provides a secure space to investigate, validate and recover critical workloads following a cyber incident. Helping you restore essential services with greater confidence while reducing recovery risk.

Why a cyber incident requires more than traditional recovery measures

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are essential for organisational resilience. However, recovering from a cyber incident introduces additional challenges.

Following a ransomware attack or security breach, organisations need to:

Understand the scope of the incident
Investigate affected systems
Contain the threat
Verify which workloads are safe to restore
Avoid reintroducing compromised data or applications

In many cases, recovering directly to production or a disaster recovery platform isn't the safest option.

That's where an isolated recovery environment can help.

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What is an isolated recovery environment?

An isolated recovery environment is a secure, separate platform used during cyber recovery. It allows for the automated repeated testing, monthly or more frequent to ensure recovery is possible and viable.

It allows recovery and forensic specialists to restore selected applications, services and data into a controlled environment where they can be investigated, tested and validated before being returned to production.

Instead of recovering your entire IT estate at once, priority workloads can be restored selectively and assessed in isolation. Once workloads have been confirmed as clean, they can be recovered to the most appropriate environment for your organisation.

How an isolated recovery environment works

Step 01

Recover priority workloads

Critical applications, servers and data are recovered into the isolated environment.

Step 02

Validate and investigate

Forensic and cyber security teams assess workloads to confirm they're free from threats.

Step 03

Approve for recovery

Validated systems and data are approved for restoration.

Step 04

Recover to the right destination

Workloads are moved into the most appropriate production or recovery environment.

Recovery destination could include:

Public cloud

Private cloud

A Wavenet mobile data centre

Infrastructure shipped to your site

Hybrid recovery environments

Benefits of an isolated recovery environment

Recover with greater confidence

Validate workloads before restoring them into production, helping reduce the risk of reintroducing threats.

Prioritise critical services

Focus recovery efforts on the applications and services your organisation relies on most.

Support faster recovery

Provide forensic and recovery teams with a dedicated environment to assess workloads without affecting wider recovery activities.

Give specialists a secure place to work

Support investigations and validation activities in a controlled environment.

Recover to the right platform

Restore validated workloads to public cloud, private cloud, mobile data centres or on-site infrastructure.

Strengthen cyber resilience

Enhance your existing disaster recovery, business continuity and cyber incident response plans.

Why organisations choose us

A complete cyber recovery partner

When recovering from a cyber incident, technology is only part of the solution. We're unique in our ability to combine cyber security expertise, business continuity services and flexible recovery options to help organisations restore services safely and effectively.

More than 3,800 work area recovery seats across the UK
Support for public cloud, private cloud and on-site recovery
Protection for more than 6.8 petabytes of customer data
Integrated business continuity and recovery services
Dedicated CyberGuard incident response specialists
Expertise across backup, replication, archive and recovery technologies

Frequently asked questions

What is a clean room?

A clean room is a secure isolated recovery environment used during cyber recovery and ransomware recovery. It allows organisations to restore and validate applications, services and data following a cyber incident before they're returned to production.

When should an isolated recovery environment be used?

They're commonly used following ransomware attacks, cyber incidents and security breaches where systems, applications and backups need to be validated before recovery.

Does a clean room replace disaster recovery?

No. An isolated recovery environment complements disaster recovery by providing a validation stage before workloads are restored into production or recovery environments.

How does an isolated recovery environment help with ransomware recovery?

It provides a secure environment where systems, applications and data can be assessed following a ransomware attack.

This helps organisations identify clean workloads, validate recovery points and test recovery procedures before restoring services. Regular exercises conducted in the clean room can help improve recovery readiness and reduce the time required to achieve a clean recovery when an incident occurs.

Can backups contain ransomware?

Yes. If backups were created after an environment was compromised, they may contain malicious code.

Validating backups and workloads within a clean room helps reduce the risk of reintroducing threats during recovery. Regular clean room testing can also help organisations identify trusted recovery points in advance, reducing the time required to recover safely during a real-world incident.

What is the difference between cyber recovery and disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery focuses on restoring services after disruption and is typically measured against recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

Cyber recovery focuses on restoring services safely following a cyber incident. In addition to recovery time and data recovery targets, organisations increasingly need to consider mean time to clean recovery (MTCR), the time taken to identify, validate and recover trusted workloads before they're returned to production.

An isolated recovery environment supports this process by providing a secure space where systems, applications and backups can be assessed, tested and validated before recovery. Regular testing within a clean room can help organisations improve recovery processes, reduce uncertainty and shorten MTCR, giving teams greater confidence that critical services can be restored safely following an attack.

Who uses an isolated recovery environment?

Recovery specialists, forensic investigators, cyber incident response teams and cyber security professionals use isolated recovery environments to support a safer recovery process.

Ready to strengthen your cyber recovery strategy?

Recovering from a cyber incident takes more than technology. It requires the right expertise, recovery capabilities and support at every stage of the journey.

With dedicated CyberGuard incident response specialists, more than 3,800 work area recovery seats across the UK, and expertise spanning backup, replication and recovery technologies, we help organisations restore critical services with confidence.

Whether you're responding to an incident or strengthening your resilience strategy, we're here to support a safer, more controlled route to recovery.

Speak to our specialists to find out how an isolated recovery environment can help you recover critical services safely and confidently after a cyber incident.

Talk to an expert

Isolated recovery environment
(clean room)

Restore critical services safely after a cyber incident