How Nutanix Provides Business Continuity Beyond Backups

Organizations hit by ransomware need more than just secure backups to get their businesses back up and running.

By Qamar Abbas

Early last year, one of our customers was hit by a ransomware attack. The healthcare organization is based in Kuwait, and attackers encrypted essentially all of their virtual machines, files, and applications.

Attackers even encrypted the organization’s third-party backups.

But, thanks to Nutanix, we were able to help our customer get all of their systems back up and running in less than 30 minutes.

In cybersecurity discussions, people often focus on backups, without fully understanding their limitations. Backups are important, of course, but they alone do not constitute an effective business continuity strategy. To fully prepare themselves to recover from ransomware attacks and other cyber incidents, organizations must invest in tools and practices that go beyond backups to provide true business continuity.

Why Backup Alone Is Not a Strategy

In some environments, backup is treated as a comprehensive data protection plan: Take periodic backups, store them somewhere safe, and hope you never need them. But this approach has two critical weaknesses.

For one, as we saw with our healthcare customer, backups themselves can be targeted. Ransomware attackers have grown more sophisticated, and they have moved beyond merely encrypting production systems to also target backup infrastructure. If a backup server is reachable from the same network as production systems, it’s a prime target. That’s exactly what happened with our healthcare customer, which is why its third-party backups were compromised along with everything else.

Also, backups are often stored on slower storage tiers to save money. To get back to business as usual after at attack, organizations must rebuild their systems from scratch, which often takes days or weeks. Even if IT leaders is able to finally restore everything, that sort of downtime can completely cripple a business.

A mature data protection strategy needs multiple layers: VM-level snapshots that live on fast storage infrastructure, replication to a secondary site or cluster, and recovery orchestration that lets you fail over quickly without calling in outside help.

The Role of Replication

Nutanix takes point-in-time snapshots of virtual machines and replicates these to a secondary site, providing protection if the primary location fails entirely. Nutanix offers three replication methods:

Synchronous Replication: Mirrors data in real time between two sites. If one site goes down, the other takes over with zero data loss. Best for protecting against site-level disasters like power outages or natural catastrophes.

Asynchronous Replication: Copies data on a scheduled interval, typically hourly or longer. Works well across geographic distance where low-latency connections aren’t available. Suitable for standard workloads where some data loss is acceptable.

Near-synchronous Replication: Replicates in windows of one to fifteen minutes while maintaining multiple recovery points. Ideal for ransomware scenarios, because admins can roll back to a specific moment before the attack.

Nutanix Secure Snapshot: Protection Against Data Tampering

Beyond replication, Nutanix provides Secure Snapshot capabilities that enhance protection against accidental deletion, corruption, or malicious activity.

Secure Snapshots:

• Are protected from modification or deletion during the defined retention period.
• Enforce snapshot retention policies at the storage layer.
• Provide application-consistent recovery points.
• Protect against administrative errors and internal threats.

Unlike traditional snapshots that can be manually removed, Secure Snapshots are locked for their retention duration, ensuring recovery points remain intact even if credentials are compromised. Our healthcare customer had Secure Snapshots enabled. The attackers never attempted to delete the snapshots, but even if they had, they would have been blocked. Secure Snapshots essentially add another layer of protection to Nutanix’s other safety nets.

What This Means for You

The lesson from our healthcare customer is clear: Business continuity requires thinking beyond backup. Adding replication and Secure Snapshots in a unified architecture transforms data protection from a footnote into a strategic component of infrastructure design.

Here’s a thought experiment: If ransomware attackers encrypted every VM in your environment tomorrow, how long would it take your organization to recover? If the answer is measured in days, rather than minutes, you only have a backup strategy. It’s time to embrace a strategy that provides enterprise-class business continuity, as well.