Best Practices for Ransomware-Resilient Disaster Recovery

AWS Backup Bunker Vault and Elastio Ransomware Recovery Assurance

Summary: Bunker vaults provide secure, immutable storage, but they don’t guarantee backups are clean or recoverable from hidden ransomware or corruption. Elastio Ransomware Recovery Assurance Platform (Elastio Platform) integrates directly with AWS Backup to proactively validate backup integrity before or after entering bunker vaults.

Rising Need for Recovery Readiness

Organizations today are expected to maintain continuous service availability, yet the risks of operational disruptions are escalating due to sophisticated cyber threats and system failures. To mitigate these risks, industries across sectors, including government, financial services, and healthcare are strengthening their disaster recovery strategies to prioritize cyber resilience.

Many adopt a Minimum Viable Company (MVC) approach, which prioritizes what data is essential to the business and should be prioritized for maximum protection to enable rapid recovery after an incident.

In a Zero-Trust security model, maximum protection means ensuring that backups remain immutable and isolated from potential threats.

One of the effective strategies is using a centralized “Bunker Account”—a dedicated AWS account where immutable backups are stored in a secure vault outside production systems.

The Logically Air-Gapped Vault is a recent AWS Backup feature which provides additional safeguards such as AWS-managed encryption keys and the ability to securely share vault access for flexible and rapid recovery across accounts.

A Critical Risk in Bunker Vaults: What if the Data in the Backups is Compromised?

The entire premise of an immutable backup vault strategy is that these critical backups will be used for disaster recovery.

But this assumption comes with a critical risk factor:

Do you know the backup data in your bunker vault is actually recoverable?

Simply storing immutable backups in a vault does not guarantee they are clean and usable. Cybercriminals infiltrate environments stealthily, embedding ransomware that remains undetected and get copied into backups, creating “a hidden threat inside” the backup itself.

Businesses often don’t realize their backups are compromised until they attempt to restore them after an attack—when it’s too late. Even non-cyber risks, such as file system corruption, can render backups useless.

You do not want to invest in a highly secure, air-gapped backup vault strategy, only to discover after an attack that your backups were compromised upon creation.

This is not hypothetical – it happens to businesses every day. Read this Elastio Platform customer case study to learn more about how a company spent a week searching for a clean backup after a cyber attack, only to discover that their most recent clean backup was a month old.

This critical risk is why AWS Backup recommends Elastio Platform as a key component of a robust cyber recovery strategy.

Elastio Platform assures that backups stored in AWS Bunker Vaults are recoverable by proactively validating data integrity at scale, like an automated recovery test.

How Elastio Platform Validates AWS Bunker Vault Strategy

Elastio integrates directly with AWS Backup, allowing organizations to validate backups either through:

Proactive Validation Before Data Enters the Vault – Scan backups before they are stored in the bunker vault to verify they are free of threats and corruption.
Recovery Testing Within the Vault – Validate backup integrity by scanning existing data backups within the air-gapped vault via AWS Restore Test.

Elastio Platform supports AWS Backup Bunker Accounts and integrates with AWS Backup Logically Air-Gapped Vault.

What Threats Are Hiding in Your Backups? Here’s What Elastio Platform Detects

Elastio Platform performs agentless deep file-level inspection of every backup, detecting threats that could compromise recovery without performance overhead.

Elastio Platform inspects for:

Zero-Day Ransomware Encryption – Uses machine learning-driven statistical, deterministic, and behavioral models to detect unknown and evolving ransomware with 99.99% accuracy.
Insider Threats – Identifies unauthorized encryption, which may indicate insider-driven attacks.
Signatures – Detects pre-detonation ransomware before it escalates.
File System Integrity Issues – Flags corrupt files and structural inconsistencies that could make restoration impossible.

Conclusion: Make Data Integrity Validation a Core Part of Your Disaster Recovery Strategy

Building a secure backup and disaster recovery strategy goes beyond simply storing backups in an immutable vault—it requires confidence that your backups are clean, uncorrupted, and fully recoverable.

AWS recommends implementing Elastio Platform’s data integrity validation into backup workflows to ensure recoverability and resilience.

(Learn more at the 2024 AWS re:Invent presentation on Building Resilience Against Ransomware Using AWS Backup here.)

Elastio Platform makes this process seamless, providing proactive detection and validation so that organizations never have to question whether their backups will work when they need them most.

If you’re exploring a backup and disaster recovery project, make sure data integrity validation is part of the process.