Aligning storage and security to strengthen cyber resilience

The reality of modern IT operations is that cyberattacks are inevitable. And while organizations invest heavily in perimeter security, deploying advanced tools to keep malicious actors out, AI is accelerating both the speed and sophistication of attacks. Criminals are increasingly successful at penetrating these defenses and gaining access to your data, which means the window to detect and respond before data is lost is closing fast.

Despite the investments, it can still take organizations an average of 276 days to identify and contain a data breach. Furthermore, in recent years, an overwhelming majority of cyber incidents (over 86%) resulted in significant operational downtime and reputational damage. 

A contributing factor to these delays, costs, and business disruptions is the disconnect between the Security and Storage teams and tools.

Historically, storage and security have operated in silos. Storage teams focused on performance, capacity, uptime, and backups, relying on the surrounding security infrastructure to protect against attacks. In the event of an attack, their primary responsibility was to recover and restore the data.

The Security team, on the other hand, focused on securing the perimeter—the networks, endpoints, and identity access—and identifying and responding to threats. However, they often lacked visibility into the storage layer, creating a critical gap and leaving the storage system—where critical data lives—exposed.

But here’s the thing: when an attack reaches your data, time is of the essence. Both teams must work together to detect and contain the attack as quickly as possible to reduce the blast radius, minimize data loss, and avoid business disruptions. Yet the lack of visibility and effective ways to collaborate means that the handoff between the Storage and Security teams often causes delays, resulting in prolonged downtime and an increased risk of data loss.

For the Security team, these delays directly impact Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), and Mean Time to Contain (MTTC). And for the Storage teams, this impacts their ability to meet their Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss that an organization can tolerate after a disruption, and their Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the maximum acceptable time for restoring IT systems, applications, or business processes after an unplanned disruption.

To achieve true business resilience, organizations must remove blind spots and bridge the gap between security and storage teams and their respective tools and processes. Effective security strategies require visibility and action across the entire technology stack, including the data layer.

Storage must evolve from a passive repository to an active defender of your data. NetApp Ransomware Resilience helps detect and contain attacks in ONTAP in real time to minimize data loss, then restores the latest clean data to enable organizations to recover fast, meet RPO/RTO targets, and reduce reinfection risk.

But storage must also be an essential player within the security ecosystem, which is why NetApp Ransomware Resilience integrates with Splunk’s Security Incident and Events Management (SIEM) and has now released a custom playbook for Splunk’s Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR).

The integration created by NetApp between Ransomware Resilience and Splunk SIEM, together with the new NetApp Splunk SOAR playbook, creates a cohesive closed-loop defense-in-depth strategy that helps security and storage teams collaborate more seamlessly to detect and respond to incidents at the data layer with greater speed and confidence.

Here’s how it works.

NetApp Ransomware Resilience actively monitors ONTAP for the earliest indicators of compromise—such as unauthorized encryption, unusual spikes in file access, or rapid mass file deletion—long before data can be exfiltrated. Through its integration with Splunk SIEM, Ransomware Resilience pushes real‑time alerts to the SIEM, enabling security teams to see the earliest signs of an attack at the data layer.

Data sent includes:

• The attack type, severity, and description of the attack
• The IP address and user ID of the attacker
• Affected cluster, volume, and storage virtual machine information

The Splunk SIEM will then use these signals from ONTAP to triage the incident and determine its severity and priority. This integration aids both the security and the storage teams in the eventual investigations, auditing, and compliance requirements after an attack has been resolved.

Next, the SIEM triggers the Splunk SOAR playbook to respond to the attack. With the release of the new NetApp Splunk SOAR playbook, downloadable from SplunkBase, Security teams can now orchestrate predefined actions on ONTAP to limit data loss and contain the attack at the data layer.

Response workflows include:

• Generating immutable, indelible snapshots to create unalterable recovery points.
• Blocking specific users or IP addresses from accessing data volumes.
• Taking compromised data volumes offline logically, moving the data out of harm's way to prevent further infection.

This targeted containment strategy isolates only affected data volumes or user accounts during an attack, avoiding full network shutdowns and keeping operations running.

Beyond creating a cohesive, closed-loop defense-in-depth strategy, these integrations eliminate the manual effort required to protect data under active attack—all without requiring deep storage expertise. Moreover, using the NetApp SOAR playbook to respond to cyber threats helps improve security team metrics like MTTC. As a result, NetApp is making it faster and more efficient for enterprises to achieve cyber resilience.

When a cyberattack occurs, every single second counts. The speed of detection and response at the storage layer is the ultimate benchmark of operational success and corporate resilience. Achieving cyber resilience requires bridging the divide between storage and security—aligning teams, integrating tools, and transforming storage into a proactive, intelligent defender.

Start by evaluating your current incident response plan. Determine exactly who owns each stage and identify any communication gaps between your security and infrastructure teams. Next, audit your storage environment to ensure it supports intelligent, automated detection and response. Integrate it with your SIEM and SOAR systems to extend the security perimeter into the data layer. This helps establish a resilient security ecosystem capable of withstanding modern threats, protecting your data at scale, enabling rapid restoration of operations, and ultimately helping get the enterprise back to business as quickly as possible.

Explore more about NetApp Ransomware Resilience

No ransomware detection or recovery system can completely guarantee safety from a ransomware attack. While it’s possible an attack might go undetected, NetApp technology acts as an important additional layer of defense.