Ransomware incidents increased ~34% year-over-year (2024 → 2025). Recovery costs commonly reach hundreds of thousands to millions, depending on downtime and data loss. Attackers increasingly use double extortion (encrypt + steal data). Cyber security is quickly becoming one of the most important investments for companies large and small.

Organizations now rely on a multilayered cybersecurity approach that includes employee training, endpoint protection platforms, advanced threat detection (EDR/XDR), spam filtering, identity controls like MFA, and a robust backup strategy. But once data is compromised, the most reliable way to recover quickly is still to restore from clean, verified backups.

How does Veeam backup help protect data against ransomware?

Immutable backups

Immutable backups are copies of your data that cannot be altered or deleted for a defined retention period. Veeam provides immutability through multiple options, including Linux Hardened Repositories and Object Storage with Object Lock capabilities. These technologies prevent any user—even an administrator or a ransomware process—from modifying or encrypting your backup files. Immutability ensures you always have clean, recoverable data no matter what happens in production.

Air-Gapping

Air-gapping keeps backup copies isolated from the network, preventing ransomware from reaching them. Traditional air-gapping uses tape media that is removed and stored offline after each backup. Today, organizations also use rotated external drives or cloud object storage tiers that remain disconnected or isolated except during backup jobs. These offline or semi-offline copies ensure that at least one version of your data remains untouched by any attack.

Veeam ONE

Detecting ransomware early can be challenging. Veeam ONE provides continuous monitoring and now includes advanced anomaly-detection capabilities that use behavioral analytics to identify suspicious activity. By tracking metrics such as CPU spikes, abnormal write patterns, or unusual data change rates, Veeam ONE can alert administrators in real time and help stop an attack before it spreads.

Veeam SureBackup

SureBackup is a feature of Veeam that allows you to create a sandbox to test your backups before restoring them to production. It can run virus and malware scans on backup sets, automatically or manually. It ensures your data is not infected without the need to restore the data somewhere first.

Secure Restore

Secure Restore scans backup data for malware during the recovery process, ensuring you don’t accidentally reintroduce infected files into production. Veeam now supports multiple anti-malware engines and integrates the latest virus definitions at restore time. This gives you an added layer of assurance that the data you are recovering is clean—even if the original backup was created before a threat was known.

Veeam DataLabs

Unsure of a workload, or suspect it may be infected? DataLabs gives you the ability to restore the data to a fully secured and isolated environment to test. A fully isolated sandbox lets you run any tests you want without impacting production systems, so you can make sure your workloads are uninfected before you restore them.

Ransomware protection alliance

Veeam is part of a group of leading hardware and software companies, like HPE, Cisco, and AWS, that work together to make sure their products integrate using the highest security standards possible. They bring together the most powerful recovery solutions to combat ransomware.

Veeam Backup & Replication is a powerful tool in the fight against ransomware, but its effectiveness depends on how it is implemented. Following modern best practices—such as the 3-2-1-1-0 rule (three copies of data, on two media types, one off-site, one immutable or offline, and zero backup-verification errors)—dramatically improves your ability to recover quickly. Combine immutability, air-gapping, monitoring, secure restore features, and regular testing to ensure your organization is prepared long before an attack ever happens.

Contact ProCern to find out more about Veeam backup and recovery solutions for your organization.