Dynamic Clean Room Orchestration Using Infrastructure as Code: A Vendor-Agnostic Reference Architecture and Identity-First Reconstitution Model for Ransomware Recovery

Abstract

Modern ransomware deliberately targets the systems an organization would rely on to recover, which makes a permanently standing recovery site a liability rather than an asset. This article proposes treating the recovery environment as something that is compiled on demand from version-controlled infrastructure definitions, rather than something that is continuously maintained and rebuilt in a deliberate, identity-first order. However, existing clean-room products, such as Commvault Cleanroom Recovery and Rubrik's cyber-recovery products, do not provide this isolation as an emergent property of the approach. Instead, they isolate as part of a proprietary control plane and order the reconstitution as a designed option, rather than an intrinsic part of the approach. The design and methodology synthesize current industry evidence on backup-repository targeting, ransomware dwell-time compression, and recovery-testing outcomes into a reference architecture with two distinguishing contributions: a vendor-agnostic isolation boundary generated from infrastructure-as-code rather than a running configuration, and an explicit identity-first reconstitution sequencing model in which directory and identity services are rebuilt and independently verified before any workload is restored. The main results, drawn from current industry benchmarking, indicate that backup repositories are targeted in 89% of ransomware attacks, that only 54% of organizations successfully use backups to restore encrypted data, the lowest rate in six years, and that organizations with tested, automated recovery procedures recover measurably faster than those without. The conclusion is that a dynamic, identity-first clean room, compiled on demand rather than maintained as standing infrastructure, offers a more defensible recovery posture than persistent recovery sites that share risk with the systems they are meant to protect, and that reconstitution order deserves the same engineering discipline as the automation that performs it.