Cyber Vaults: How Regulated Sectors Fight Cyberattacks

The steady drumbeat of high-profile cyberattacks – Marks & Spencer, Conduent, CDK Global – highlights just how widespread and damaging ransomware has become. Even organizations with robust, multi-layered cybersecurity stacks are being breached. The reality is that no set of preventative controls can keep up with every emerging threat. When those controls fail, recovery becomes the last line of defense between crisis and continuity.

This evolving threat landscape is prompting a fundamental shift in focus: organizations are turning their attention to recovery – not as a secondary concern, but as a strategic priority. As that focus deepens, they’re realizing recovery strategies must be purpose-built for ransomware, not just generic system failures.

In response, organizations are investing in cyber vaults: secure, isolated environments that preserve the data needed to restart mission-critical operations. As both existential threats and regulatory scrutiny grow, vaulting has moved from niche best practice to strategic imperative, especially in financial services and other highly regulated sectors.

But a vault is only as strong as the principles it’s built on. Without immutability, isolation, and integrity working in concert, even the most secure vault can fall short when it matters most. In this post, we’ll examine the forces driving this new wave of recovery strategy and outline the key components required to make it successful.

Why Cyber Vaulting Is Becoming the New Normal

Organizations are learning perimeter defenses alone aren’t enough. You have to assume you will be breached and prepare accordingly. The challenge is that recovery procedures have become the target of bad actors because that’s where they get the most leverage. They’re adopting tactics that deliberately target recovery infrastructure. According to a leading vendor’s Ransomware Trends Report, in 93% of ransomware incidents, attackers specifically target backup repositories; 75% of victims lost at least some backups, and 39% lost backup systems.

For this reason, there’s increased scrutiny and control over backup strategies. It’s not enough to just take backups and check the box – you need to know they are reliably and provably resilient against bad actors.

Cyber vaults are emerging as a key way organizations achieve that assurance. These highly secure environments protect immutable copies of mission-critical data – typically the data that enables the “minimum viable company” (i.e. the essential functions and systems that must remain). Cyber vaults achieve this by creating logically and physically isolated environments that sever the connection between production and backup systems. This isolation ensures known-good copies remain untouched, ready for recovery in the event of a ransomware attack.

The Core Pillars of an Effective Cyber Vaulting

A cyber vault isn’t just a backup location – it’s a controlled recovery environment designed to withstand a ransomware attack.

To succeed in that role, a vault must enforce three interdependent controls: immutability, isolation, and integrity – each countering different ways attackers aim to compromise recovery.

• Immutability ensures stored data cannot be altered or deleted for a defined retention period. Enforcement must occur at the storage layer and be protected against administrative overrides. This prevents direct encryption or deletion of backup data by ransomware actors or rogue insiders.
• Isolation segments the vault from production environments using logical separation (e.g., separate credentials and access paths), physical air-gapping, or cloud-based regional controls. Without isolation, ransomware can move laterally into backup infrastructure and corrupt it.
• Integrity means validating that data hasn’t been silently compromised before it’s placed in the vault to protect against stealth encryption tactics. A secondary expert scan capable of detecting subtle encryption patterns and latent threats provides a critical safeguard for ensuring only clean data enters the vault.

I’ve seen the consequences of missing one pillar firsthand. An SaaS company was hit by a fileless ransomware attack. The decryption key was stored only in memory, allowing systems to run normally while encrypted data was silently backed up for more than 10 days. When the key was wiped, backups which had appeared operational were unusable. The DR team faced two choices: spend days hunting for a clean backup or pay the ransom. Their vault had immutability and isolation, but no integrity validation – and it cost them.

The takeaway? A cyber vault only fulfills its promise when built on all three pillars. Each must function as an enforceable control. Increasingly, boards and regulators aren’t just expecting these controls — they’re demanding proof they are in place, operational, and effective. Leave one out, and the entire recovery strategy is at risk.

How Regulations are Driving Adoption

Adoption of the cyber vaulting is no longer just a financial services imperative. Other highly targeted sectors — including healthcare, utilities, and insurance — are now embracing cyber vaulting as recoverability becomes synonymous with business survival.

This shift is also being driven by more stringent regulations, which now expect demonstrable resilience and proof of recoverability.

In the past three years, compliance mandates have increasingly emphasized backup integrity validation, retention enforcement, and operational recovery readiness. Consider the following:

• DORA (EU) mandates resilient backup strategies and immutable storage to ensure financial stability during operational disruptions.
• NYDFS (New York Department of Financial Services) requires immutable backups and regular disaster recovery testing to protect customer data in the event of a cyberattack.
• SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) demands detailed disclosures around incident response and recovery — forcing companies to prove their continuity plans can withstand real-world threats.

In regulated industries, failure to demonstrate recoverability can lead to fines, public scrutiny, and regulatory sanctions. These pressures are elevating backup and recovery from IT hygiene to boardroom priority, where resilience is increasingly viewed as a fiduciary responsibility.

Final Thoughts

Organizations are coming to terms with a new reality: prevention will fail. Recovery is what defines resilience. It’s not just about whether you have backups – it’s whether you can trust them to work when it matters most.

Cyber vaulting is no longer a niche best practice. It’s becoming a strategic cornerstone for regulated sectors, driven by a convergence of threat pressure, compliance mandates, and board-level scrutiny. But vaulting alone isn’t a silver bullet – unless it’s built on immutability, isolation, and integrity, it risks becoming just another compromised control.

Leaders responsible for recovery assurance must now ask themselves: Are we protecting our backups, or are we protecting our ability to recover?

That’s the real test of resilience – and that’s where the vault earns its place.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Najaf Husain

Najaf Husain is a four-time founder and the CEO of Elastio. With more than 25 years of experience leading high-growth, venture-backed software companies, he has a strong track record of solving complex challenges in IT infrastructure, particularly in security and storage. As founder of AppAssure, Husain transformed the company into a global leader in application recoverability, earning recognition from Inc. Magazine as the fastest-growing backup company. At Elastio, he’s leveraging deep expertise to deliver zero-day ransomware protection and assured recovery for businesses worldwide. Husain holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland. Outside of work, he enjoys startup investing, competitive car racing, and attending polo matches with his family.