Zero Trust Isn’t Just for Access Control - It Must Extend to Your Data

Ransomware has evolved to bypass traditional defenses, encrypt data in stealth, and corrupt backups long before it’s detected. That’s why assuming breach isn’t just prudent but essential. And it’s not enough to protect data; you need to prove it's recoverable.

A true Zero Trust approach requires continuous inspection of data integrity across every layer: production, replication, and backup. Because when recovery time comes, the only thing that matters is whether you have a known, recent, uncompromised recovery point. Without it, you're facing extended downtime, uncertainty, and potential regulatory risk.

For enterprises running mission-critical workloads on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN), these stakes are real and rising.

That’s why AWS, NetApp, and Elastio have partnered to embed Zero Trust resilience directly into the storage and recovery stack. Together, they deliver a layered defense strategy that goes beyond prevention, providing:

• FSxN with inline anomaly detection to catch ransomware early
• AWS Backup for orchestrated, isolated backups with automated restore validation
• Elastio for deep, offline data integrity scans that verify recovery points across replicas and backups

This integrated approach ensures you're not just storing data, you're continuously proving it's clean and restorable.

Best Practices for Ransomware Recovery Assurance on FSxN

1. Inline Threat Detection with NetApp Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP)
ARP, built into FSxN, uses machine learning to detect suspicious activity in real time. It looks for signs like spikes in entropy, mass file modifications, or abnormal access patterns. When triggered, ARP can automatically take a snapshot and alert your team, preserving a clean state for investigation.

2. Resilient Replication with SnapMirror
SnapMirror enables efficient block-level replication from on-prem or in-cloud ONTAP environments to FSxN. This creates a secondary DR copy that maintains deduplication, compression, and snapshot chains, enabling fast recovery and minimal data loss if primary systems are compromised.

3. Secure, Orchestrated Backups with AWS Backup
AWS Backup adds a third layer of protection with secure, policy-driven backups of FSxN volumes. These backups can be isolated across Regions or accounts and paired with Restore Testing to automatically validate recoverability without impacting production systems.

4. Deep Data Integrity Validation with Elastio
Elastio scans both SnapMirror replicas and AWS Backup recovery points offline, outside of production environments. It detects attacks that frontline tools often miss, including:

• Slow, stealthy encryption that unfolds over time
• Fileless malware that never touches disk
• Data corruption that silently undermines recovery

Elastio applies a Zero Trust model to recovery, ensuring only verified-clean restore points are used. This drastically reduces recovery risk and unplanned downtime.

Why This Matters

Ransomware often hides in plain sight, compromising systems silently and corrupting backups before an attack is discovered. Without layered validation, organizations risk recovering into failure.

By combining real-time detection with ARP and offline integrity scanning with Elastio across production, DR, and backup layers, this solution delivers:

• Early warning of active compromise
• Clean, trusted recovery points
• Stronger compliance posture (DORA, NYDFS, HIPAA)
• Faster, safer recovery when it counts

In a world where ransomware is designed to hide, visibility is your greatest defense. Validated recovery is your ultimate assurance.