Cleanroom recovery means restoring data into an isolated environment, scanning it, and validating it before it goes back into production. The hard part sits one step earlier, because a cleanroom only helps if the copy you carry into it is clean.
Restore a backup that already holds the attacker's encryption, and the cleanroom becomes a well-isolated place to rediscover the same incident.
That happens often. Veeam's 2024 Ransomware Trends Report found that 63% of organizations restored backups straight into production with no quarantine or scanning at all.
So when I compare the leading enterprise backup platforms for cleanroom recovery, I look at two jobs: who supplies the isolated environment, and who proves the copy is clean. Few do both, which is fine once you know which half you're buying.
Short on time? Here's where each platform lands:
Eon handles the work a cleanroom depends on: it finds and preserves the last verified clean recovery point, then restores only the affected files, tables, or records into the isolated environment you run.
Commvault and Cohesity ship packaged cleanroom products, Commvault Cleanroom and FortKnox clean room recovery. Rubrik adds threat hunting to a clean room you build, while Dell PowerProtect keeps copies in an isolated Cyber Recovery vault.
Veeam orchestrates clean rooms for VM estates through DataLabs, and Druva pre-verifies data in its own cloud before handing it to your recovery environment.
What does a cleanroom recovery need?
Vendors use the word loosely, so I split it into four requirements.
- An isolated environment. Its own network, credentials, and admin plane, so an attacker who still holds production access can't follow the data in.
- A known-clean copy. A recovery point verified before the incident that still exists after retention rolls forward.
- A way to scan and validate. Malware and indicator-of-compromise scanning, plus a check that the restored application starts and behaves.
- Recovery scoped to what was damaged. Bringing back the tables that were hit is a far shorter job than rebuilding a whole account.
None of the seven covers all four equally, which is why pairing two products is common.
1. Eon: finding the clean point before you restore
Built for: Cloud-first enterprises on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, plus Kubernetes and MongoDB Atlas. The platform provides cloud data protection and recovery from a single read-only role, with no agents, appliances, or clusters to run.
Cleanroom approach: Backups land in immutable, logically air-gapped vaults by default, held in a separate cloud account the company manages outside your production identity boundary. Detection correlates multiple independent signals (such as entropy and ransom notes) into one weighted score.
For managed databases like Amazon RDS, Aurora, and Google Cloud SQL, it looks for row-count anomalies, schema changes, and unauthorized table deletions. It also keeps the latest verified clean snapshot beyond standard retention.
From that point you restore only the affected files, tables, or records, and individual records come back in minutes without a full-environment rebuild.
Pricing: Usage-based, billed per GB per month for the storage you back up, with flexible spending commitments and no public list price as of October 2026. Forever-incremental backups and cloud-native deduplication inside the vault bring backup storage cost down 30–50%.
Trade-off: The platform doesn't run a cleanroom or isolated recovery environment, so you pair it with one you operate or one another vendor supplies. On-prem support is limited, so an estate that's still mostly on-prem needs a separate tool for the data center. The reference list is also shorter than the incumbents can show.
2. Commvault: a packaged cleanroom for application-heavy estates
Built for: Enterprises whose recovery plans revolve around SAP and Oracle. Commvault is SAP-certified and recovers from a full database down to a tablespace or a single data file.
Cleanroom approach: Commvault Cleanroom provides an isolated recovery environment on demand for testing recovery plans and running forensic analysis. It runs Commvault-managed or self-managed (fully on-prem included), with no hardware required.
Commvault also separates two terms people blur: a cleanroom is temporary and on-demand, while an isolated recovery environment is persistent and hardened.
Pricing: No public dollar pricing for Commvault Cloud as of October 2026. Self-managed licensing is capacity-based, measured in Front-End Terabytes.
Trade-off: Application consistency is agent-based, so the SAP HANA agent goes on both source and target machines. Cloud cleanroom sites also expect a secondary copy in Commvault AirGap, and Azure sites need a subscription production has never touched.
3. Cohesity: clean room recovery from the vault
Built for: Organizations with deep data-center footprints, including many that arrived through Cohesity's December 2024 combination with Veritas's enterprise data protection business.
Cleanroom approach: FortKnox clean room recovery became generally available on September 22, 2026, for both FortKnox SaaS and self-managed environments. It recovers vaulted snapshots into an isolated clean room for investigation and validation before production is restored.
Cohesity RecoveryAgent can also spin up a clean room and check candidate recovery points against Google Threat Intelligence and hash feeds.
Pricing: No public dollar pricing as of October 2026. Cohesity Data Cloud comes in Core and Enterprise editions, sold as 1-, 3-, or 5-year subscriptions.
Trade-off: Threat hunting, data classification, and cyber recovery orchestration are Enterprise-only, and cyber vaulting is a paid add-on in both editions. Price the full cleanroom path as edition plus add-on.
4. Rubrik: threat hunting before the restore
Built for: Security-led teams that want cyber recovery and threat hunting from the same vendor. Rubrik Identity Resilience also watches Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, and Okta, which matters because a compromised directory poisons any cleanroom.
Cleanroom approach: Rubrik Cyber Recovery adds Recovery Simulation for testing plans in isolated environments and Threat Containment for isolating infected snapshots. It integrates with a clean room you build (a separate AWS account, Azure tenant, or on-prem site).
Threat Monitoring scans backups for indicators of compromise using Mandiant and Rubrik Zero Labs intelligence, although file-based scanning needs files to read, and a managed database like Aurora or RDS doesn't expose its contents as files.
Pricing: Quote-based through sales, with no public price list as of October 2026.
Trade-off: You own the clean room build. In the cloud, the customer-hosted model also leaves networking and IAM with you, while Rubrik says its managed model has a narrower slice of configuration options today.
5. Dell PowerProtect: an isolated vault for Data Domain estates
Built for: Dell storage estates running PowerStore, PowerMax, or PowerScale arrays alongside Data Domain appliances.
Cleanroom approach: PowerProtect Cyber Recovery keeps critical copies in a vault with its own network, credentials, and management plane, never connected to production. That vault is Dell's isolated recovery environment, on-prem or in a public cloud.
Cyber Detect scans data inside the vault and reports blast radius, corrupted files, and last known good backups.
Pricing: Quote-based as of October 2026, since Dell's product pages route buyers to sales.
Trade-off: The stack centers on Data Domain appliances you deploy and run, and the deepest integrations assume Dell arrays. Retention Lock modes are separately licensed and configured per MTree.
6. Veeam: orchestrated clean rooms for VM estates
Built for: VM-heavy estates on VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Proxmox VE, and more, under a portable per-workload license.
Cleanroom approach: DataLabs is Veeam's clean room capability, bundling SureBackup verification, Secure Restore, and Staged Restore. Veeam Recovery Orchestrator 13.1 adds a fully isolated environment to validate recovery readiness or investigate compromise.
Pricing: Veeam Data Platform licenses are metered per workload, with no per-workload price published as of October 2026. Orchestration sits in the Premium edition, and Veeam Data Cloud Vault starts at $4.50 per TB per month on its Archive tier, with Foundation at $14.
Trade-off: A cleanroom plan on Foundation or Advanced means more manual steps. Outside Veeam Vault, immutability is something you configure yourself, repository by repository.
7. Druva: pre-verified data for your clean room
Built for: Teams whose data spreads across endpoints, SaaS apps, and identity stores, and who want a fully managed service with no infrastructure to run.
Cleanroom approach: Druva doesn't host a clean room. Its Cyber Recovery Runbooks find trusted recovery points through Recovery Intelligence and Threat Hunting, restore into a segmented clean room you provide, then run boot validation and antivirus scans.
Druva's position is that data should arrive in your clean room pre-verified, though it concedes rules like DORA might still require a dedicated isolated recovery environment.
Pricing: Infrastructure plans are priced per TB per month after deduplication, with no dollar figures published as of October 2026. Anomaly detection, Quarantine Bay, and curated cyber recovery are paid add-ons, even on Elite.
Trade-off: The cleanroom-relevant features cost extra on every tier. Druva's AWS support matrix (October 2025) also says RDS Cluster backup and restore isn't supported.
Rehearse the cleanroom before you need it
A cleanroom you've never stood up under time pressure is a plan on paper. The first live run tends to surface something nobody wrote down, like a firewall rule, a domain controller that won't boot, or credentials that only ever existed in production.
So pick one critical application and run the whole sequence this quarter: find the last clean point, restore it into isolation, scan it, validate it, and time every step.
Then note who owned each step. Any answer that sounds like "we'll work it out on the day" is the gap you came looking for.
FAQ
What is cleanroom recovery in enterprise backup?
Cleanroom recovery restores backup data into an isolated environment with its own network and credentials, where it's scanned and validated before going back into production. It keeps a compromised restore from reinfecting the systems you just rebuilt.
Does a cleanroom replace immutable backups?
No. Immutable backups stop attackers from altering or deleting your copies, while a cleanroom checks those copies before they return to production, so a sound recovery plan needs both.
What should a platform do before data enters a cleanroom?
A platform supports cleanroom recovery well when it can identify the last verified clean recovery point, keep it past normal retention, and restore only the damaged records. Eon does that work for cloud workloads and pairs with an isolated environment you run or another vendor supplies.
