Fast, clean data recovery with NetApp Ransomware Resilience

Ransomware attacks are no longer a question of if—they're a question of when. And how your organization responds in the aftermath makes all the difference between a minor disruption and a costly, prolonged crisis.

Here's what often gets overlooked: paying the ransom doesn't guarantee safety. In fact, 83% of victims who paid were attacked again, while 45% of victims failed to recover all their data. And 38% of organizations were reinfected after an attack because threats weren't fully eradicated.

The true solution goes beyond detecting and stopping attacks, although that is important. It also involves having processes and technologies in place to recover from an attack so your business can continue moving forward, your data isn't reinfected, and setbacks are avoided.

This post explains why an effective recovery process is the cornerstone of ransomware resilience, and how the right approach can help your organization avoid the worst outcomes.

When ransomware hits, every second of downtime counts and carries a high cost. Beyond stalled operations, organizations may face significant financial losses that directly impact the balance sheet. The longer it takes to recover from an attack, the more it erodes shareholder value, with reputational damage lingering long after systems are back online. In addition, legal issues may arise—including regulatory fines, compensation payments, and expenses associated with compliance and litigation.

Traditional data recovery methods, such as manually identifying affected files, locating clean backups, and restoring data piece-by-piece, can take weeks. For most businesses, that's simply not acceptable.

Speed matters. But speed alone, is not enough.

Here's a scenario that plays out more often than it should: an organization recovers from a ransomware attack, restores its data, and gets back to business—only to be hit again within weeks. This isn't bad luck. It's short-sighted.

If malware isn't completely removed before restoring data to your production environment, the threat doesn't just persist—it lurks in the shadows, ready to strike again and unleash another devastating attack.

Reinfection happens because the root cause was never truly eliminated.

Fast recovery is only valuable if it's also a clean recovery.

Clean recovery means restoring data that has been verified to be free of malware, before it goes back into your production environment. It's a more rigorous process than a standard backup restoration, and it requires tools that can do three things well:

• Identify exactly which data has been affected.
• Remove malware without compromising the integrity of the recovery point.
• Restore a verified, clean version of your data with minimal loss.

Done manually, this process is complex, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Done right with a guided and automated process, it becomes fast, repeatable, scalable, and reliable.

NetApp Ransomware Resilience Clean Restore feature is built to do exactly this—clean it, and restore your data fast, while minimizing the risk of reinfection and maximizing the amount of data recovered.

Here's how Clean Restore works, step by step:

1. Isolates affected workloads to contain the damage and prevent it from spreading further.
2. Scans data for malware and encryption to assess the full scope of the attack.
3. Recommends recovery point options:
   • The latest unencrypted snapshot from before the attack started to achieve the fastest recovery.
   • Searches for the most up-to-date unencrypted version of every file, from across all applicable snapshots, and curates the recovery point to maximize the amount of data that can be recovered.

   You then select the best option that meets your business needs

4. Removes malware from the selected recovery point data, before any data is restored.
5. Restores the verified, clean recovery point back into your production environment.

This guided, automated process removes the guesswork and manual effort that slows traditional recovery. The result: less downtime, less data loss, and a much lower chance of being hit again.

Resilience isn't just about surviving an attack. It's about getting back to full operations quickly—and staying there.

An efficient data recovery strategy for your data does more than reduce immediate business disruptions. It maximizes the amount of data recovered and breaks the cycle of reinfection. It helps avoid the significant costs of data recovery. And it gives your teams a clear, repeatable process to follow when the pressure is on to restore operations.

At NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, we bring deep expertise in data and the infrastructure that supports it. This intelligence is embedded into NetApp Ransomware Resilience, empowering our customers to recover their data quickly and stay resilient after an attack so that they can continue to drive innovation and growth.

To explore more about NetApp Ransomware Resilience with Clean Restore

• Watch the video
• Try NetApp Ransomware Resilience for free
• Get the technical information