Traditional Disaster Recovery Won’t Save You from Ransomware — Here’s What Will

Introduction

Ransomware attacks are increasing in both frequency and sophistication, posing a significant threat to businesses worldwide. As a result, IT and Operations (I&O) leaders are strengthening their protection, detection, and response strategies. However, many are discovering that their existing disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans are not enough to handle ransomware.

Traditional DR plans were designed to recover from physical disruptions like power outages and natural disasters — not the deliberate, multi-stage attacks that define modern ransomware. This gap creates significant challenges when organizations attempt to recover from ransomware using conventional DR methods.

The challenge is even greater because ransomware can infiltrate backups through system replication. Unlike a fire or flood, which only affects the primary environment, ransomware can silently spread to backups — creating hidden threats that undermine recovery efforts. 

Without the right detection and validation processes in place, recovery efforts could end up restoring the very threat that caused the problem in the first place.

This article explores why traditional DR plans are ineffective against ransomware, why ransomware recovery is more complex, and how businesses can build a more resilient recovery strategy that applies a zero-trust model to backups — validating data integrity and detecting hidden threats before recovery.

Disaster Recovery vs. Ransomware Recovery: What’s the Difference?

While traditional disaster recovery and ransomware recovery share some common goals — restoring systems, minimizing downtime, and protecting data — they address fundamentally different types of threats.

Traditional Disaster Recovery (DR): Handling Predictable Events

Traditional DR is designed to handle physical events that disrupt IT infrastructure, such as power outages, fires, floods and earthquakes.

The standard DR strategy is to “fail over” to a backup location when a disruption occurs. A failover involves switching operations to a secondary site that has been kept in sync with the primary site.

The process typically looks like this:

1. An outage or failure is detected.
2. The organization decides whether to fail over.
3. If failover is required, systems are brought online at the backup site.
4. Business operations resume with minimal downtime.

This approach works because physical events are predictable — even though the timing is unknown, the nature of the disruption and the recovery process are well understood.

Ransomware Recovery: Handling Unpredictable Cyberattacks

Ransomware recovery is fundamentally different because it involves a deliberate and unpredictable attack.

Key challenges of ransomware recovery include:

• Ransomware is often deployed after weeks or months of infiltration.
• Attackers may have already compromised system credentials and network configurations.
• The ransomware itself could be embedded in backups, making standard recovery impossible.
• Unlike physical disruptions, ransomware targets both data and infrastructure, often corrupting the very systems needed for recovery.

This last point is critical. Traditional DR processes rely on replication — continuously copying data and systems to a backup site to ensure the backup is ready for failover.

But if ransomware infiltrates the primary environment, it can spread to backups through replication — introducing hidden threats into the recovery process.

This makes ransomware recovery fundamentally different from traditional DR. Recovery isn’t just about restoring systems — it’s about eliminating hidden threats before restoration to avoid reinfection.

This complexity also explains why in 2024, the average cost of recovery reached $2.73M – an increase of almost $1M since 2023.  Ransomware Payments Increase 500% In the Last Year, Finds Sophos State of Ransomware Report | Sophos