FalconStor has introduced FalconStor Cloud Clean Room, a new platform designed to allow organizations to conduct validated recovery tests in a secure, on-demand environment. This solution aims to address the persistent challenge of ensuring data recoverability without the significant cost and complexity of maintaining dedicated recovery infrastructure.
The Cloud Clean Room is built upon FalconStor's patent-pending zero trust secure enclave (ZTSE) technology. It functions as a distinct infrastructure layer that can be deployed across various use cases and integrated by third-party software vendors and service providers. The platform operates within IBM Cloud, leveraging global infrastructure in IBM's PowerVS environments.
A key feature of the Cloud Clean Room is its ability to create and destroy recovery test environments as needed. Each test begins from a known, clean state, eliminating the risk of issues or malware from previous exercises carrying over. This approach ensures that organizations have verifiable proof of recovery, rather than just a completed checklist.
The problem FalconStor aims to solve is the gap between the stated priority of cyber resilience and organizations' actual confidence in their recovery speed. While many organizations prioritize cyber resilience, a significant portion lack confidence in their ability to recover quickly after a cyberattack or data loss event. Building and maintaining dedicated clean room infrastructure for testing has historically been cost-prohibitive and operationally complex.
FalconStor Cloud Clean Room addresses this by providing on-demand infrastructure, thereby removing the need for customers to maintain a constant replica and its associated expenses. The platform manages all infrastructure provisioning within the enclave, from the creation of IBM Power LPARs to their decommissioning, requiring no cloud expertise from the customer.
The first offering to integrate with the Cloud Clean Room is FalconStor Habanero, an existing solution for managed offsite backup and archive vaulting for IBM i, IBM Power, and tape environments. This integration provides customers with a complete backup-to-validated-recovery capability on IBM Cloud, specifically for IBM Power systems, without requiring customers to possess IBM Cloud expertise.
This combination allows Habanero customers to perform validated recovery tests within a secure, FalconStor-managed infrastructure environment on IBM PowerVS. FalconStor handles all underlying infrastructure provisioning and orchestration, while customers initiate and manage their recovery tests. This is particularly beneficial for IBM Power users, including those still using tape, as it offers a path to meeting cyber resilience and regulatory requirements without necessitating a complete system overhaul.
Beyond the Habanero integration, FalconStor has designed the Cloud Clean Room as a foundational infrastructure layer that can be licensed and embedded by independent software vendors (ISVs) and service providers. This allows them to offer on-demand clean room capabilities as part of their own services, such as augmenting cyber resilience, enabling on-demand infrastructure, or onboarding managed services, without having to develop the orchestration technology themselves.
FalconStor views the Cloud Clean Room as a versatile platform with potential applications beyond cyber resilience, wherever isolated, on-demand compute and storage environments are needed that can execute reliably and leave no residual risk. The solution is designed to help organizations meet regulatory requirements, including DORA, FFIEC, and PCI-DSS, by providing documented proof of recovery on demand.
