AI-ready starts with ransomware-resilient storage

Your data is no longer passive. It learns, it creates, and it moves. It’s the foundation of your AI success, but for most organizations, data is where AI stalls. At NetApp INSIGHT^® 2026, we shared that roughly 85% of enterprise data, the content that gives AI its meaning and context, is unstructured and scattered across siloed storage, clouds, and remote sites, which makes it hard to find, unify, and put to work.

NetApp AI Data Engine™ helps by making distributed enterprise data AI-ready without moving or copying it or rebuilding your storage architecture. But making data AI-ready isn't enough. Data sprawl also makes that data hard to protect consistently, and that valuable data is exactly what attackers go after.

Too often, AI readiness and ransomware protection are treated as two separate conversations. They're one, and they meet at the storage layer: it's where your business data lives, where your AI models and agents draw from, and where attackers ultimately aim. Data-layer infrastructure that can’t withstand and recover from ransomware isn’t AI-ready.

AI is speeding up attacks and raising the stakes

An attack isn’t a matter of if, but when. And bad actors are taking advantage of AI to perpetrate more sophisticated attacks faster than ever before. The time you have to detect and respond is rapidly shrinking.

Moreover, the data that attackers seek to steal, encrypt, or delete is the same data your own AI agents use to make decisions. When ransomware locks or destroys that data, it affects the processes that deliver the AI outcomes you’re counting on.

The business stakes are already steep. The average cost of a ransomware attack in 2026 is $4.99M. 45% of organizations are unable to recover all their data after an attack, and 38% report that they were reinfected because threats weren’t fully eradicated. Fewer than 1 in 20 organizations were able to recover from a breach quickly, in under 50 days.

Whether the cause is a rogue AI agent, an AI or human attacker, or an insider, the damage lands in the same place: your data and your AI strategy. That’s why the data layer can’t sit on the sidelines; it has to be an active participant in proactively protecting your data.

Build resilience into the storage layer, where your data lives

There’s a saying in security: if you’re reachable, you’re breachable. The same is true of data. If it’s valuable, it’s a target, and if it’s a target, you need to be able to detect, protect, and recover from a ransomware attack—at the speed of AI.

That starts at the storage layer, and that's the thinking behind the NetApp Platform™: intelligent data infrastructure for the AI era—with one platform for any data, any workload, anywhere. Its Data Resilience capabilities, including NetApp Ransomware Resilience™, part of the NetApp Console™, build protection, detection, response and recovery into the data layer itself.

Find what’s at risk, protect what matters most

Proactive protection starts with knowing what you need to protect. Ransomware Resilience shows you which data matters most and what’s at risk, so you can close protection gaps before an attacker finds them. It recommends the right protection policy for that data and can apply it in one click, so consistent protection doesn’t depend on configuring every policy one by one across your entire estate.

Real-time detection and response to threats, human or AI

Securing AI starts with controlling access: NetApp zero trust controls govern which data your AI agents can reach. But access controls alone can't tell whether an agent with permission is about to delete or encrypt something it shouldn't. Ransomware Resilience detects and alerts on anomalous user behaviors, encryption activity, known malicious extensions, or mass deletion activity the moment they start—whether it comes from a human or an AI agent, and whether it’s malicious or accidental.

And it doesn’t stop at the alert. Ransomware Resilience responds automatically. It takes an immutable snapshot, a copy of your data that can’t be altered or deleted, so you have a trusted recovery point. It can also block the suspected user’s access to the data, as well as block write attempts with known malicious extensions. The attack is contained before it spreads, and data loss is limited.

Ransomware protection should also be part of your SecOps tools and processes. Ransomware Resilience sends real-time, data-layer alerts to your SIEM solution, including the attack type and severity, the user and IP address, and the affected volumes. NetApp also provides SOAR playbooks so security teams can act directly on storage based on their specific policies.

Detection is the alarm; fast, clean recovery is the goal

Detection tells you something went wrong, but it doesn’t get you back to work. Fast recovery is the key to resilience, and recovery only matters if it’s clean. If you restore data with malware still in it, you risk being attacked again. For the AI workloads and agents that depend on that data, every extra hour of downtime delays the results your business is waiting on.

Ransomware Resilience includes a Clean Restore capability that guides you through the recovery process, so your team isn’t trying to piece it together under pressure. It isolates affected workloads and scans for malware and encryption. It then recommends and curates the best recovery point for your needs, whether your priority is getting back online fast or recovering the most data possible. From there, it removes any malware and restores verified data to production. The goal is recovery in minutes to hours, not days to weeks, without reintroducing the threat.

Now supporting Google Cloud NetApp Volumes

Your data doesn’t live in one place, so your protection can’t either. At NetApp INSIGHT, we announced that Ransomware Resilience now supports Google Cloud NetApp Volumes (GCNV), extending ransomware protection to organizations running on Google Cloud in addition to existing support for on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure and AWS. Combined with support for Google SecOps SIEM integration and a NetApp SOAR playbook, Ransomware Resilience gives organizations running on Google Cloud more ways to bring data-layer protection into their security operations.

One platform for data that’s AI-ready and protected

Ransomware Resilience, as part of the NetApp Platform, builds ransomware protection directly into your data layer. When your data is protected where it lives and recoverable when it matters, it’s ready for AI and for wherever the next attack comes from. Detect early. Contain instantly. Recover clean. Every time.

Learn more about NetApp Ransomware Resilience, watch a demo, or connect with a specialist for tailored expertise.

Disclaimer: No ransomware detection or prevention system can completely guarantee safety from a ransomware attack. Although it’s possible that an attack might go undetected, NetApp technology acts as an important additional layer of defense, and our research indicates NetApp technology has resulted in a high degree of detection for certain file encryption-based ransomware attacks.