In today’s rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, businesses face a growing number of threats that require a multi-layered defense strategy. The challenge is navigating the vast array of security solutions available and understanding how they work together to provide comprehensive ransomware protection.
With new security technologies emerging—EDR, XDR, CNAPPs, immutable backups—it can be challenging to determine the best approach for safeguarding critical data. Security leaders often struggle to create a cohesive strategy that balances prevention, detection, and recovery to ensure resilience against modern ransomware attacks.
This blog series is designed to simplify the complexity of ransomware protection by exploring how different security solutions fit together and complement each other in today’s threat landscape.
Rather than replacing existing tools, the Elastio Platform fills a crucial but often overlooked gap—ensuring that organizations can recover quickly and safely from validated clean data when an attack occurs.
Each post in this series will examine how Elastio Platform works with key security technologies, providing end-to-end ransomware protection with continuous recovery assurance.
Elastio Platform & Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs)
Introduction
CNAPPs and Elastio Platform work together by combining proactive security controls with continuous reliable recovery assurance—while CNAPPs help prevent and detect threats, Elastio ensures that businesses can recover safely and quickly by continuously validating data integrity and pre-scanning backups for ransomware, malicious encryption from insiders, corruption, and other hidden recoverability threats.
What is a CNAPP?
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) secure cloud applications and workloads by combining several security capabilities:
- Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) – Identifies cloud misconfigurations and compliance gaps.
- Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP) – Defends against malware, unauthorized access, and runtime threats.
- Identity & Access Security – Protects identity-based configurations from exploitation.
Leading CNAPP vendors include Wiz, Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, and Lacework.
CNAPPs proactively identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposed secrets in code, infrastructure, and cloud workloads. CNAPPs help businesses reduce risk by continuously scanning environments before attackers exploit weaknesses.
Where CNAPPs Stop & the Elastio Platform Begins
CNAPPs strengthen cloud security by identifying risks and preventing breaches, but they don’t ensure recoverability when an attack occurs.
“Backup Breakdown: How Data Recovery Impacts the Outcome of Cyber Attacks”, one major finding reveals that of the 92% who invest in data backup solutions, less than two thirds (63%) successfully restore their data when they experience a ransomware attack, and more than one in four businesses (31%) see their backups fail. – At Bay, the InsurSec provider for the digital age
The Elastio Platform fills this gap by proactively inspecting offline storage and backups for ransomware, unauthorized encryption, corruption, and other recoverability threats, ensuring recovery points remain clean. It also proactively detects post-breach threats, preventing organizations from restoring compromised data and reducing downtime.
Without continuously scanning backups as they are created, businesses risk discovering too late that their backups are infected or unusable. The Elastio Platform removes this uncertainty, ensuring that recovery is always possible, safe, and disruption-free.
Function | CNAPP | Elastio Platform | |
Risk Reduction & Attack Prevention | Identity & Access Security | Yes | No |
Cloud Workload Protection | Yes | No | |
Cloud Security Posture Management | Yes | Some Identifies Storage Misconfigurations | |
Post-Attack Recovery Assurance | Scans storage and backups for ransomware encryption | No | Yes |
Scans storage and backups for ransomware payloads | No | Yes | |
Scans storage and backups for unauthorized encryption by insider threats | No | Yes | |
Scans storage and backups for unauthorized encryption for file-system corruption | No | Yes |
Case Study: When CNAPP Protection Wasn’t Enough – How Elastio Detected Qilin Ransomware in Backup Data
A cloud-native enterprise relied on a leading CNAPP for security monitoring. Despite its strong preventive controls, the organization suffered a ransomware attack that evaded detection.
When security teams identified the attack, their backups were already compromised with Qilin ransomware—a sophisticated strain that encrypts cloud storage and evades traditional defenses.
However, before restoring data, the company ran Elastio Platform’s ransomware inspection on its backup storage. The Elastio Platform detected the Qilin infection hidden deep into their backups, preventing them from restoring recent data without risking reinfection.
Had the organization integrated Elastio Platform’s proactive scanning earlier, the ransomware would have been detected in the backups early, before it could spread further, and they would have been automatically directed to a prevalidated clean recovery point.
This case highlights a key takeaway:
Even with a CNAPP, organizations need continuous data integrity validation to ensure their recovery points are clean.
Conclusion: Prevention + Recovery = True Ransomware Resilience
Cloud security isn’t just about stopping attacks—it’s also about ensuring businesses can recover when something inevitably gets through.
CNAPPs offer robust preventive measures but do not provide post-attack recovery assurance.
- Elastio Platform fills this gap by ensuring recovery is safe, fast, and compromise-free.
- By proactively and continuously inspecting backups and storage across AWS and VMware, Elastio Platform assures that businesses always have clean, recoverable data points.
For organizations investing in CNAPP solutions, the next question is: Are you confident your recovery points are clean and recoverable if ransomware strikes?
Elastio ensures the answer is always YES.
