When cyber attacks freeze production, investigation comes first. In the event of a sophisticated cyberattack, the immediate priority is not restoring production, but launching a thorough investigation. This shift in mindset is essential for organizations aiming to achieve true cyber resilience. This blog post is committed to delivering end-to-end cyber resilience, from design to deployment and ongoing support, and the Clean Room approach with Dell Cyber Recovery and Veeam Recovery Orchestrator (VRO).
The Cyber Sanctuary: Dell DataDomain as a fortress:
A cyber sanctuary is a secure, air-gapped environment designed to protect your most critical backup data. Dell’s DataDomain technology forms the backbone of this sanctuary, offering:
- Immutable Backups: Data is stored in its native format, protected from modification or deletion—even by sophisticated attackers.
- Air-Gapped Isolation: The sanctuary is physically and logically separated from production networks, ensuring backups remain inaccessible during a breach.
- Data Diode Protection: With one-way data flow, information can enter the sanctuary but never leave, preventing lateral movement from compromised production environments.
This architecture ensures that, no matter the sophistication of the attack, your backup data remains untouched and available for forensic analysis and recovery.
Entropy Analysis: Detecting the undetectable:
Modern cyberattacks often involve subtle data manipulation or malware persistence within backups. To counter this, advanced entropy analysis systems are deployed within the sanctuary:
- Automated Behavioral Analysis: Continuously monitors backup integrity.
- Anomaly Detection: Identifies signs of compromise or hidden malware.
- Entropy Signatures: Validate that data hasn’t been tampered with or poisoned.
- Pattern Recognition: Spots attack artifacts embedded in backup sets.
These capabilities ensure that only clean, uncompromised data is used during recovery.
The Clean Room – Controlled, Secure Recovery:
Once the investigation phase is complete, the focus shifts to reconstruction. The Clean Room is a dedicated, isolated environment where validated infrastructure is rebuilt and critical workloads are safely redeployed. Unlike the sanctuary, which is used for forensic analysis, the Clean Room is where:
- Systems are restored from verified backup sources.
- Each workload is tested for malware and functional integrity.
- Only after passing all checks are systems reconnected to production networks.
This staged approach minimizes the risk of reinfection and ensures business continuity.
Veeam Recovery Orchestrator (VRO): Proven, Automated Recovery Orchestration:
Veeam Recovery Orchestrator (VRO) is a cornerstone of modern cyber resilience, delivering automation, compliance, and speed in disaster recovery scenarios. Here’s how VRO brings value, as illustrated by real-world dashboards and reports:
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Automated Testing for Recovery Assurance
VRO automates the testing of recovery plans, ensuring organizations can proactively identify potential issues before a real disaster strikes. Automated tests highlight any impacts to recovery, providing confidence that plans will work when needed most. - Automated Documentation and Compliance
Maintaining up-to-date documentation for compliance and audits is a challenge. VRO eliminates this headache by automatically generating and updating documentation as recovery plans are created, tested, and executed. This ensures organizations are always ready for regulatory reviews and internal audits, with comprehensive, real-time records. - One-Click Recovery for Rapid Response
When every second counts, VRO enables one-click recovery, orchestrating the restoration of critical workloads from immutable backups. This minimizes downtime and accelerates the return to normal operations, regardless of the scale or complexity of the incident. - Advanced Malware Scanning and Reporting
VRO integrates advanced malware scanning into the recovery workflow. Before any system is restored, VRO can perform offline scans using antivirus engines and YARA rules, as shown in the detailed drill-down and audit reports:-Drill-Down Malware Reports: VRO provides granular visibility into each restore point, indicating whether malware, viruses, or suspicious patterns (via YARA) are detected. For example, a report might show that out of five restore points for a virtual machine, three had malware issues, with clear indicators for each scan type.
-Audit Reports: These summarize the results of malware scans across multiple virtual machines and restore points, highlighting any failures or infected VMs. The reports detail which scans (malware flag, YARA, antivirus) passed or failed, and provide timestamps for full traceability.
This layered approach ensures that only clean, uncompromised data is restored, reducing the risk of reinfection and supporting forensic investigations.
Data Resilience Across Environments:
VRO is designed to orchestrate recovery across diverse environments—cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS, and containers—integrating seamlessly with backup, recovery, portability, and security layers. This holistic approach, underpinned by Zero Trust Architecture, ensures that data resilience is maintained no matter where workloads reside.
Action Plan – Deploying VRO on a Dell Cyber Recovery Sanctuary:
Implementing VRO on a Dell DataDomain based cyber sanctuary is a structured, multi-phase process designed to maximize security, automation, and operational resilience. Here’s a step-by-step action plan:
Step 1: Study & Design
- Conduct workshops to identify business-critical applications, RTO/RPO objectives, and network isolation requirements.
- Define the target architecture, including Dell DataDomain as secondary storage, Clean Room network segmentation, and VRO integration.
- Assess potential risks and mitigation strategies.
- Prepare the Technical Architecture, network flow matrix, and Test Plan.
Step 2: Platform Installation
- Install VRO servers, configure network and security settings, and set up the SQL Server database.
- Integrate VRO with Veeam Backup & Replication and Dell DataDomain repository.
- Apply security hardening to the OS, VRO application, and database.
- Validate connectivity, network flows (including Dell DataDomain diode), and baseline configuration.
Step 3: Pilot Testing
- Select non-critical business applications for initial testing.
- Prepare Virtual Labs (DataLabs), create recovery and orchestration plans, and configure SureBackup jobs.
- Test replication, performance (Dell DataDomain read speeds), orchestration, and RTO/RPO thresholds.
- Simulate incidents, verify RTO/RPO, test integrated reports, and conduct failover/failback exercises.
- Analyze results, identify improvements, and optimize configurations.
Step 4: Production Rollout
- Scale resources for production workloads.
- Configure high availability as supported by the Clean Room infrastructure.
- Identify and prioritize critical applications for VRO orchestration.
- Set up all recovery jobs and validate with comprehensive testing.
- Generate and distribute VRO compliance and execution reports.
Step5: Global Testing & Validation
- Perform load and full failover tests, validate monitoring and alerting.
- Engage business users for operational validation and crisis communication drills.
- Complete acceptance testing and finalize documentation.
Step 6: Go-Live & Support
- Activate monitoring.
Train operational teams (skills transfer) and transfer documentation.
Confirm regular service operation.
Why Cyber Resilience matters:
Being prepared for a cyber crisis is not about hope, it’s about engineering systems that can withstand, investigate, and recover from the most sophisticated attacks. By combining immutable backup architectures, air-gapped sanctuaries, automated orchestration, and Clean Room recovery, organizations can ensure business continuity even in the face of disaster.
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v12.1 release – Veeam Data Platform: Blog Post
Veeam v12.1 – Integration with SIEM Systems : Blog Post
Veeam v12.1 – Object Storage as backup target: Blog Post
Veeam v12.1 KMS Support: Blog Post
Veeam v12.1 Malware Detection and YARA: Blog Post
