NetApp’s Real-Time Ransomware Defence: AI-Infused Enterprise Storage and Enhanced Cyber-Resilience Solutions

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the intelligent data infrastructure company, today announced cyber-resiliency capabilities that will equip customers to better protect and recover their data in the face of ransomware threats. NetApp is one of the first to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) directly into enterprise primary storage to fight ransomware in real time. The NetApp cyber-resiliency capabilities protect both primary and secondary data for organisations whether it is stored on-premises or in the cloud.

Cybercriminals are increasingly aiming ransomware attacks at critical infrastructure and supply chains where operational disruptions can cost millions of dollars, according to Forrester. As a result, 87% of C-suite and board-level executives ranked ransomware as a high, or the top, priority for their organisation, according to the NetApp 2023 Data Complexity report. When cybercriminals breach perimeters, networks, and identities storage becomes the last line of defence for organisations’ most critical data. With the threat of ransomware looming, organisations need solutions that not only protect their data but also quickly recover lost data and return to normal operations. NetApp is updating its cyber-resiliency solutions and leveraging the power of AI to give customers confidence that their data will be safe and accessible when they need it.

“NetApp is taking an aggressive and proactive approach to protecting our customers’ data against cyber threats using artificial intelligence. We are the first storage vendor to explicitly and financially guarantee our data storage offerings against ransomware,” said Mignona Cote, CSO at NetApp. “Today, we are furthering that leadership with updates that make defending data comprehensive, continuous, and simple for our customers.”

NetApp is focused on designing data storage and management systems that maximize data protection and security while meeting data governance and compliance standards, with new updates that include:

• ONTAP Autonomous Ransomware Protection with Artificial Intelligence (ARP/AI) will spearhead the next generation of real-time enterprise storage ransomware protection, giving increased accuracy and performance required to detect and mitigate new, more sophisticated cyber threats. NetApp pioneered autonomous real-time detection of ransomware directly in primary enterprise storage three years ago. Now, NetApp will be leading the charge to use adaptive AI/ML models built directly into enterprise primary storage to look at file-level signals in real time to detect even the newest ransomware attacks with planned 99%+ precision and recall. NetApp will be offering the first technology preview of ARP/AI within the next quarter.

• NetApp BlueXP Ransomware Protection, now in public preview, provides a single control plane to intelligently coordinate and execute an end-to-end, workload-centric ransomware defence. Customers can now identify and protect critical workload data with a single click, accurately and automatically detect and respond to a potential attack, and recover workloads within minutes, safeguarding their valuable data and minimizing costly disruption.

• Application-Aware Ransomware Protection via NetApp SnapCenter 5.0 offers immutable ransomware protection for applications. SnapCenter will now apply NetApp’s leading ransomware protection technologies, previously used with unstructured data, to application-consistent backup. SnapCenter 5.0 includes support for key ONTAP features like tamperproof Snapshot copy locking, SnapLock protected volumes, and SnapMirror Business Continuity to enable more robust data protection for applications and virtual machines. SnapCenter 5.0 supports the protection of applications on-premises with NetApp AFF, ASA, and FAS, as well as in the cloud.

• NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery, now generally available, offers seamless integration with VMware infrastructure and provides storage options for both on-premises and major public cloud environments. This comprehensive solution eliminates the need for separate standby disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure, reducing costs. With NetApp BlueXP disaster recovery, failover and failback processes are simplified, allowing smooth transitions from on-premise VMware infrastructure to the public cloud or to an on-premises data centre.

• NetApp Keystone Ransomware Recovery Guarantee extends NetApp’s current Ransomware Recovery Guarantee to our leading storage-as-a-service offering, NetApp Keystone. With this guarantee, NetApp will warrant snapshot data recovery in the event of a ransomware attack. If snapshot data copies can’t be recovered through NetApp, we will offer compensation*.

“In today’s highly distributed IT environment, organisations in the Asia Pacific must look beyond the traditional perimeter to strengthen their cyber resilience and disaster recovery capabilities,” said You Qinghong, Solutions Engineering Lead, Greater China, ASEAN and South Korea, NetApp. “NetApp’s data-centric, inside-out approach to cyber resilience embeds AI-driven protection directly into the storage infrastructure, providing defence at its most critical point – where the data resides, in owned data centres or anywhere in the cloud.”

“Today’s cybersecurity teams face the monumental task of protecting their companies’ data from ever-evolving threats, especially ransomware,” said Archana Venkatraman, Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC. “NetApp’s approach of delivering a secure, unified storage infrastructure makes storage foundational for ransomware protection and reduces the burden on cybersecurity teams.

Companies looking to fortify their cyber resiliency and shifting protection left will increasingly look to vendors that take a secure-by-design approach and develop unified storage and data services.”

“Using NetApp in our Advanced Technology Center, we significantly simplified our replication process for VMware virtual machines and their underlying data stores to meet or exceed recovery benchmarks,” said Derek Elbert, Solutions Architect at WWT. “With NetApp’s solutions, we successfully established the recovery policies for cloud volumes workloads or virtual machines with no existing DR strategy, managing everything through NetApp BlueXP. This transforms how we operate disaster recovery for VMware.”

“To store sensitive genomics and health data, we have to use the right technology with layers of security built in,” said Mark Cowley, Deputy Director at Children’s Cancer Institute. “With NetApp, we can be very confident that we are sharing the right data only to authorized researchers. The last line of defence is your weakest web-based system, so we’ve implemented role-based access and added resilience to all of our tools.”

The latest cyber resiliency updates from NetApp empower organisations to proactively address cybersecurity threats in complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments, leveraging AI to identify threats and prevent disruptions to their operations.

To learn more about the NetApp cyber-resiliency offerings visit here.