Ransomware resilience
Ransomware recovery for South African businesses and MSPs
Immutable backups, clean restore points and orchestrated recovery — so an attack becomes a recovery exercise, not a ransom negotiation.
Recovery, not ransom
The best response to ransomware is a clean recovery
Ransomware is designed to leave you with no option but to pay — encrypting production data and, increasingly, hunting for and destroying backups. Recoverability changes that equation. When immutable, clean copies exist beyond the reach of the attacker, an incident becomes a controlled restore rather than a crisis. Prevention reduces the chance of an attack; recoverability decides what happens when one gets through.
Immutable backups
Backup copies cannot be altered or deleted for a defined retention window — so ransomware cannot encrypt or destroy your last line of defence.
Clean restore points
Multiple recovery points let you roll back to a state that predates the intrusion, rather than restoring an already-compromised copy.
Orchestrated recovery
Runbooks sequence the recovery of critical systems first, turning a chaotic incident into a defined, repeatable process.
Anti-ransomware defence
Behaviour-based protection within Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud detects and blocks ransomware activity, reducing the blast radius before recovery is needed.
From incident to recovery
A defined path back to operations
An effective response follows a repeatable sequence rather than improvisation under pressure. Each stage is planned in advance and validated through testing.
1. Detect and contain
Endpoint detection identifies malicious behaviour and isolates affected devices, limiting how far an attack can spread before recovery begins.
2. Identify a clean point
Recovery works backwards to the last known-good restore point that predates the compromise — avoiding reinfection from an already-encrypted snapshot.
3. Restore systems
Full systems and data are restored to a running state from immutable copies, either in place or to standby cloud infrastructure.
4. Validate and resume
Restored workloads are validated before returning to production, and evidence is captured for governance, insurers and post-incident review.
Readiness
Recoverability is proven before an incident, not during one
The time to discover whether your backups are clean, complete and restorable is not the morning after an attack. Regular recovery testing turns assumptions into evidence — confirming that clean restore points exist and that critical systems can be brought back within acceptable timeframes.
What a recovery-ready posture includes
- Immutable backups beyond the reach of attacker accounts
- Multiple retained recovery points to select a clean state
- Anti-ransomware detection to limit the blast radius
- Tested runbooks that sequence critical systems first
- Evidence reports for insurers, auditors and boards
Frequently asked questions
Can you recover from ransomware without paying the ransom?
Yes. When immutable, clean backup copies exist from before the attack, systems and data can be restored to a pre-infection state without decrypting files or paying a ransom. The goal is to make paying unnecessary rather than to negotiate.
What makes a backup safe from ransomware?
Immutability. An immutable backup cannot be modified or deleted during its retention window, even by an administrator account. This means ransomware that reaches the backup environment still cannot encrypt or erase the recovery copies.
How do you avoid restoring an already-infected backup?
Multiple recovery points are retained over time. Recovery identifies the last known-good point that predates the compromise, so you restore a clean state rather than reintroducing the malware from a recent, already-encrypted snapshot.
Is ransomware recovery the same as disaster recovery?
They overlap but are not identical. Disaster recovery restores operations after any disruption. Ransomware recovery adds specific controls — immutability, clean-point selection and anti-ransomware detection — because the threat actively targets and corrupts backups.
Where is the recovery data stored?
Through Soteria Cloud, backup and recovery data is held on infrastructure hosted in Teraco data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, keeping recovery within South African borders.
Related solutions
Make ransomware a recovery exercise, not a ransom decision
Talk to Soteria Cloud about building recoverability that holds up when it matters most.