Beyond mere cybersecurity, cyber resilience encompasses an organization’s ability to both protect against cyberattacks and rapidly recover and maintain operational continuity in the face of incidents. At its core, it’s about “keeping good data safe from bad things” and ensuring that even after an incident, data remains secure and recoverable.
While many organizations initially focus on backup as a necessity, often realizing its true value only after experiencing a security breach, the shift in the threat landscape, particularly with the rise of ransomware, has made a holistic data resilience strategy indispensable.
The Evolving Challenges in Data Protection
One of the most pervasive threats is ransomware, which has profoundly impacted how businesses approach security. Despite investments in various cybersecurity tools, many organizations still fall short on fundamental protections like immutable backups, leaving them vulnerable.
Additionally, a significant operational hurdle for security teams is alert fatigue. Analysts inundated with alerts find it exceedingly difficult to triage and identify genuine threats amidst the noise. Compounding this, organizational silos, such as backup administrators and IT managers operating separately from security teams, hinders seamless communication and implementation of cohesive security practices.
Furthermore, many organizations lack proactive incident response planning, often failing to engage in critical discussions about potential responses – including payment policies and legal implications – before an attack occurs, leading to pressure-induced rushed and suboptimal decisions.
Delivering Cyber Resilience with Veeam
Veeam provides robust cyber resilience through a multi-faceted approach, integrating its own technological advancements with a broad network of security partners and specialized incident response services.
Veeam’s core product, the Veeam Data Platform (VDP) 12.1, introduced significant advancements, including:
- Threat Center: A centralized dashboard that provides a high-level overview of potential threats, malware detections, backup anomalies, and SLA compliance within the protected environment.
- AI-Built-in Malware Detection: inline scanning during the backup process that can identify malicious activity, newly encrypted data, large compression changes, or unusual algorithmic behaviors.
- Proactive Threat Hunting: signature-based scans of existing backups to identify potential threats, helping organizations find the last clean restore point.
- Indicators of Compromise (IOCs): identification of known threat actor toolkits and behaviors such as unauthorized installations, permission escalations, new user creation, MFA deactivation, or firewall changes.
- Security and Compliance Analyzer: assess the Veeam infrastructure against best practices for security and hardening, checking for adherence to MFA, four-eyes authorization, and other critical configurations.
- Immutability: ensures that malicious actors cannot alter or delete backup data.
- Veeam ONE: monitoring and reporting that gathers data from virtual machines, cloud workloads, M365 backups, and enterprise applications like SAP and Oracle, identifying suspicious activities like brute-force logon attempts.
- Yara Rules and Instant VM Recovery: rapid, targeted scanning of backups for specific strings during an incident combined with high-speed data recovery for VMs.
- Veeam Recovery Orchestrator: customize playbooks for application recovery, perform scans using Yara rules across recovery points, and automatically generate audit trails and documentation. It continuously validates that Veeam meets the organization’s Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), and service level agreements (SLAs).
- Incident API: Provides a bi-directional communication channel, allowing external security products to trigger an out-of-band backup within Veeam, capturing data before it becomes fully encrypted during an active attack.
Veeam actively collaborates with over 65 security vendors, including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, and Splunk. This strategy allows organizations to leverage their existing security investments by feeding Veeam’s detailed event information into their preferred platforms.
Acquired in March 2024, Coveware specializes in incident response, particularly ransomware negotiation, and proactive preparedness.
- Expert Negotiation: Coveware can negotiate with threat actors on behalf of an organization, primarily to stall for recovery rather than advising payment.
- Proactive Planning: Coveware conducts tabletop exercises to force organizations to think through incident scenarios, including payment decisions, before an actual attack, highlighting the importance of pre-planning.
- Recon Scanner: deployed on impacted systems to collect logs, aid forensic investigations, and build attack timelines by correlating events with the MITRE ATT&CK framework and Coveware’s proprietary ransomware group database.
Potential Considerations
Veeam says that the performance of its scans and recoveries is “100% predicated on the terrain in which you use it,” meaning the underlying storage infrastructure significantly impacts speed. High-latency storage, for example, will degrade performance.
Bridging the communication gap between backup/IT admins and security teams can also be an organizational obstacle to fully leveraging Veeam’s security integrations. Additionally, Veeam acknowledges that some users may not adhere to best practices, such as updating software or implementing immutable backups, which can undermine security efforts.
Why This Matters
The challenges of ransomware, alert fatigue, siloed operations, and slow recovery times are existential threats to modern organizations. Veeam’s data resilience approach addresses these issues through a combination of platform capabilities, security partnerships, and specialized incident response services.
For CISOs evaluating data protection strategies, Veeam represents a comprehensive solution that extends beyond traditional backup functionality. The platform’s immutable backup capabilities provide reliable data recovery options, while Coveware’s incident response services offer both reactive support and proactive planning assistance. Veeam’s integration capabilities allow organizations to incorporate the platform into their existing security infrastructure rather than requiring wholesale replacement of current investments.
The platform’s AI-driven threat detection, centralized monitoring through the Threat Center, and automated recovery orchestration can help organizations improve their incident response capabilities. While implementation success depends on factors like underlying infrastructure and organizational alignment between IT and security teams, Veeam’s approach offers a practical framework for enhancing cyber resilience and maintaining business continuity during security incidents.
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