How to accelerate incident response and recovery with Cohesity cyber recovery orchestration and automation

Responding quickly and recovering safely after a cyberattack is one of the most operationally demanding moments for any security or IT team. To help organizations navigate this, Cohesity’s cyber recovery orchestration in Cohesity Data Cloud brings together automated clean room provisioning, AI-assisted investigation, and orchestrated recovery into one workflow. 

The Cohesity 5 Steps of Cyber Resilience© framework, seen below, offers actionable guidance for strengthening your cyber resilience. 

Cyber recovery orchestration is how IT and security teams turn recoverable backups and threat investigation into an actual, practiced, repeatable return to business operations.

Cohesity's cyber recovery orchestration automates and coordinates the provisioning, operation, and teardown of isolated recovery environments—often called clean rooms. This lets you rehearse the full recovery workflow, validate your playbooks, and close gaps before a crisis. When an incident hits, you can execute those same validated workflows with confidence. 

Each rehearsal helps you optimize your incident response and recovery process and builds operational muscle memory. The result: improved capability and confidence that directly reduces your incident response and recovery time.

The capabilities detailed below help IT practitioners support the investigation and execute recovery. This means less manual triage, fewer handoffs across teams, and faster, validated cyber recovery under pressure.

How new cyber recovery orchestration capabilities in Cohesity Data Cloud speed incident response and recovery

On-demand clean room provisioning:  When you can't trust anything in your environment, you need a completely clean space—built from scratch, on-demand. Cohesity Data Cloud now automates the provisioning of a clean room environment, creating the isolated network and folder structure within supported hypervisors, so your team doesn’t have to build infrastructure in the middle of a cyberattack. When the investigation is over, you can tear down the environment just as easily.

Fig. 1: On-demand clean room provisioning within VMware vCenter simplifies setup and ensures consistency for recovery drills and actual incidents.

AI-assisted workload isolation accelerates forensics: Cohesity Data Cloud now automatically flags high-anomaly workloads and groups impacted systems into recovery sets, using Cohesity’s familiar AI assistant. Your team reviews and approves before anything moves. From there, the AI assistant guides you through creating and executing a reusable blueprint to move them into the clean room. This means manual triage during an active incident shrinks dramatically, and the playbook you build during this incident is ready to run the next one.

Initiate investigations faster with instant access to workloads: Cohesity Data Cloud now gives investigators direct read access to virtual machines cloned from backup snapshots—hundreds at once, in minutes—in the clean room, without requiring full restores or additional storage. Now, your team can immediately access the data they need and start working, rather than waiting for a full restore. Faster investigation leads to faster decisions about recovery point selection and remediation—directly improving RTO.

Databases and other workloads mount inside the clean room using Instant Mount, so your security team can analyze these systems safely. The same capability lets IT teams validate recoverability and rehearse Minimum Viable Company restoration before an incident ever happens.

Faster recovery point selection with Google Threat Intelligence: Cohesity Data Cloud now scans available recovery points with Google Threat Intelligence and other intelligence feeds, evaluates the results along with historical anomaly and threat scan data, and then recommends the snapshots with no known indicators of compromise. This analysis helps you identify the best available recovery point faster, accelerating one of the most time-consuming steps in recovery.

Last-mile recovery automation: Cohesity Data Cloud now gives you the ability to integrate critical post-restore tasks such as IP and network customization, DNS updates, and traffic cutover sequencing into the orchestrated recovery workflow. This approach helps ensure that recovered services function correctly, and business operations resume faster.

Define how to recover faster with new blueprint templates: Recently added blueprint templates provide predefined operation sequences for common recovery scenarios such as recovery readiness validation and clean room recovery. Instead of building a blueprint from scratch, you can select a template to quickly create a blueprint with a recommended workflow. Templates are available for workloads across three categories: resilience testing, cyber recovery, and disaster recovery.

Fig. 2: Each template pre-populates the blueprint canvas with a recommended set of operations (e.g., threat scan, recover, pause) that can be modified.

Operationalize your clean room

Let’s consider the big picture, and how these capabilities support the cyber incident response and recovery workflow: 

• Before an incident: Pre-configure your clean room environment and rehearse your response playbook, including on-demand clean room provisioning. 
• During an incident: Provision the clean room, use the AI assistant to identify and group compromised workloads, instantly access workloads from backup for forensic purposes, and execute a recovery blueprint into the clean room. 
• After the incident: Automatically tear down and deprovision the clean room, then carry the refined blueprint forward to your next rehearsal.

Turning the 5 Steps into an operational workflow

Cyber resilience is a journey. You’re always working to improve your discipline. The Cohesity 5 Steps of Cyber Resilience© framework offers security and IT leaders a model for building that discipline. Cyber recovery orchestration is the operational layer that makes it real. 

With these capabilities, “practice application recovery” means you’re not improvising in the heat of an incident. This is now a workflow your team can run on demand and improve over time. It’s not a theoretical commitment buried in a tabletop exercise.  

For teams on the front line of cyber response, the payoff is concrete: response and recovery become orchestrated, repeatable, and faster every time it runs.

Learn more:

• Cohesity cyber recovery orchestration solution brief
• Product documentation (customers only)
• Register for Minimum Viable Company webinar