The growing complexity of enterprise IT compounds the potential attack surface that organizations must defend. Global organizations’ attack surfaces on average include more than 300 new services each month, with companies in some industries adding as many as 7,000 per month.
With such a high level of vulnerability to cyber threats, robust and consistent disaster recovery protocols are crucial for safeguarding operational systems and backup repositories. Accordingly, CEOs are steadily pushing for organizational resilience instead of focusing on cybersecurity alone.
Isolated recovery environments (IREs) are increasingly central to this proactive approach. An IRE is a secure space separated from live production environments and designed to enable restoration and verification of critical systems and data following a disaster. An IRE allows teams to rebuild workloads without disrupting post-incident forensic investigations.
An IRE is more than just a technical safeguard; it’s a strategic tool for building trust, ensuring continuity and maintaining compliance. Still, many organizations are constrained in their implementation. This is because traditional IRE solutions are tightly linked to specific hardware, storage or cloud providers, which leads to vendor lock-in, limits scalability and decreases operational flexibility.
At a time when hybrid and multi-cloud operating models prevail, a vendor-agnostic approach to IREs is increasingly essential to ensure organizational security and resilience.
At a time when hybrid and multi-cloud operating models prevail, a vendor-agnostic approach to IREs is increasingly essential to ensure organizational security and resilience.
The power of vendor-agnostic IREs
According to the M-Trends 2025 report, almost half of ransomware attacks involve the use of remote management tools to break through security controls. The attacks cannot infiltrate IREs, because they are inherently disconnected from production networks. But not all IREs are created equal. An ideal IRE design is vendor-neutral and compatible with any operating system, hypervisor or cloud platform, ensuring broad applicability and flexibility.
Vendor-agnostic IREs provide companies the following powerful benefits.
- Ability to keep existing investments across diverse platforms: A vendor-agnostic IRE allows organizations to maintain their existing infrastructure while ensuring that they can recover quickly and effectively from a breach. Using the platforms and systems they already have in place is the most cost-effective approach to establishing an IRE that will increase organizational resiliency as technology evolves.
- Fast adaptation to technology changes and business requirements: Vendor-agnostic IREs are flexible by nature, allowing fast adjustment to shifts in technology, business imperatives and the regulatory environment. For example, a flexible IRE can assist an organization in complying with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new requirement for public companies to disclose material cybersecurity incidents within four business days.
- Reduced risk by avoiding single points of failure: Relying on one vendor can make recovery impossible if their technology or credentials are compromised. A vendor-agnostic IRE removes this vulnerability by maintaining resiliency during a vendor failure or widespread disruptions, including targeted cyberattacks.
- Seamless orchestration and automation across any infrastructure: Vendor-agnostic IREs can operate smoothly across various operating systems, storage options, hypervisors and cloud service providers. This flexibility simplifies disaster recovery and allows organizations to integrate automation tools and workflows without adhering to proprietary systems. Recovery can thus be faster and easier, and the IRE more adaptable to future infrastructure changes.
Success factors
An ideal IRE design is abstracted, interoperable, automated and portable. These factors allow an IRE to function well regardless of the specifics of its hardware or service providers.
Separating recovery functions from specific hardware or cloud services
Ensuring compatibility across a range of operating systems, hypervisors and storage solutions
Using platform-independent tools and scripts to orchestrate recovery workflows
Enabling restoration and validation of workloads and data in any appropriate physical, virtual or cloud-based environment
Kyndryl’s approach to vendor-agnostic IREs
Creating a truly vendor-agnostic IRE requires thorough planning and a layered approach. Kyndryl follows a comprehensive playbook to help organizations put the most effective system in place while maintaining their existing infrastructure.
The Kyndryl approach to establishing a vendor-agnostic IRE includes the following essential steps:
- Begin with a thorough risk assessment to identify your most valuable assets and understand the potential threats they face.
- Ensure alignment and support by engaging all relevant stakeholders, such as IT, security, compliance and business leaders.
- Establish document requirements for interoperability, scalability and regulatory compliance as early as possible in the project lifecycle.
- Invest in cross-platform backup and recovery solutions that can function in air-gapped or highly restricted environments.
- Use approaches that simplify data management process techniques, such as deduplication, efficient transfer protocols and local recovery.
- Keep a centralized repository for runbooks and related resources to ensure consistency and ease of accessing information in the scripts.
- Create a well-defined governance framework for IRE access, operations and incident management response.
- Engage staff to overcome unfamiliarity and encourage a culture of continuous growth through training, assessments and peer collaboration reviews.
Kyndryl’s approach to building a vendor-agnostic IRE architecture aims to provide strong business continuity and disaster recovery across hybrid and multi-cloud setups. It guarantees operational resilience through automation, scalability and compliance.
There are several key differentiators of this approach:
- Integrated disaster recovery and business continuity
- Automated failover and orchestration for minimal downtime
- Streamlined recovery processes with advanced automation and Agentic AI
- Reduced manual intervention, and improved speed and reliability
- Support of diverse workloads across on-premises and cloud
- Streamlined adaptation to evolving business needs
- Built-in frameworks for regulatory compliance
- Enhanced security controls to protect data integrity
- Pay-as-you-go models and efficient resource utilization
- Lower total cost of ownership than traditional disaster recovery solutions
- Real-time monitoring and predictive analytics
- Proactive risk management and resiliency posture improvement
Industry applications for vendor-agnostic IREs
Vendor-agnostic IREs are beneficial across various industries, offering a range of benefits tailored to each industry’s specific needs.
Financial services
Financial institutions are subject to stringent regulations that necessitate swift and verifiable data recovery processes. A vendor-agnostic IRE enables financial platforms to function on a global scale, supports data recovery across diverse environments and sustains continuous compliance, even in the event of vendor breach or outage.
Healthcare
Healthcare infrastructure depends heavily on essential electronic health record (EHR) platforms, imaging systems and IoT medical devices that must stay operational even during cyberattacks or outages. A vendor-neutral IRE helps ensure HIPAA compliance by maintaining data integrity across systems and reducing the risk of relying on a single vendor.
Manufacturing
Manufacturers operate within hybrid environments encompassing diverse platforms and systems. A vendor-agnostic IRE enables prompt recovery of operational technology and IT systems irrespective of vendor origins. Additionally, it ensures the capacity to restore proprietary data and supports integration with emerging technologies.
Critical infrastructure
Critical infrastructure encompasses utilities, transportation and government agencies that oversee essential services requiring uninterrupted operation. A vendor-neutral IRE operates seamlessly across legacy systems, cloud platforms and specialized control systems to ensure expedient and comprehensive recovery in accordance with regulatory frameworks.
Why Kyndryl? Future-ready recovery
IREs are progressively becoming a vital component of a comprehensive cyber resilience strategy. At Kyndryl, we offer cyber-incident recovery solutions that use industry best practices, specialized technologies and extensive expertise to mitigate cyber risks and minimize the business impact of outages.
We design, build, implement and manage operational resilience solutions, such as vendor-agnostic IREs, that enable fast, reliable and scalable recovery across hybrid multi-cloud environments.
Competencies:
- 6 Global Security Operation Centers
- 50+ countries with Kyndryl Resiliency Centers
- 500+ Security & resiliency patents
- 576+ Exabytes of client data backed up annually
- 70M+ identities managed annually
Recognitions:
- Leader, 2025 NelsonHall NEAT evaluation for Attack Surface Management
- Leader, 2024 Omdia Universe Global IT Security Services Providers
- 2023 Dell Technologies Transformational Partner of the Year
- 2024 Rubrik GSI Partner of the Year
- AWS Resilience Competency Partner
Ready to enhance your cyber recovery with a vendor-agnostic IRE?
Contact Kyndryl to discover how our cyber-recovery services can help you design an IRE that will minimize the business impact of outages and disasters.
