The smart enterprise is backing up its data every day. However, there’s a dilemma. While you’re backing up your business-critical data, cybercriminals have made backup environments into high-value targets for cyberattacks. As a result, highly available, cyber secure backup targets have become an absolute necessity for enterprises. In addition to continually servicing backups, backup targets need to perform forensic analysis and facilitate fast restores. A new world of cyber secure backup has emerged.

Amid an ominous backdrop of highly sophisticated, AI-augmented cybercrimes, deepfakes and diversions, ransomware, malware and other cyberattacks are being increasingly launched against data backup repositories. More than 93% of ransomware attacks now target backup data to prevent data recovery and increase the pressure for enterprises to make significant “ransom” payments, with 75% of these attempts successfully compromising backups, according to Rubrik Zero Labs report.

Backup repositories are being breached. It’s a stark reality that CIOs, CISOs, IT security managers and backup administrators need to accept and address. And you need to ask yourself a critical question – the answer to which may either save or sink your enterprise business. You cannot deny the inevitable. What if the way that your enterprise is backing up data is the weak link?

Therefore, you need to rethink your data protection strategies to counter the ways that cyberattacks work to encrypt, steal, cripple, and compromise your backup in secondary storage. With today being World Backup Day 2026, it’s the perfect time to consider adopting new capabilities that will better protect your backups and accelerate cyber recovery.

The Risky Business of Backups

The speed of cyberattacks has shifted from days or weeks to now hours or minutes. Cybercriminals are compressing the attack lifecycle. Although traditional backup is effective for standard restore, it’s not great for rapid recovery from such attacks. Restoring data to a point can happen rather quickly, but large-scale recovery of large environments of data is not optimal – even if the backup is not disabled. Traditional backups typically leave large gaps between points when data is protected. This increases risk of data loss and unwanted downtime. The threat window must be reduced.

Cybercriminals attack backup environments in order to gain leverage. On average, it can take 22 days or more to determine affected data and then recover, according to various cybersecurity market reports. That’s why it’s best to protect data as close to the source as possible, with short-term retention, as well as many potential validated recovery points.

On World Backup Day 2026, we are reminded of the importance of awareness, understanding and taking action to stay one step ahead of the cybercriminals that desire to harm your enterprise. The good news today is that there is a clear path to cyber secure backups.

Cyber Storage Resilience and Rapid Recovery − Guaranteed

Infinidat offers enterprises a next generation of data protection that is a cyber-focused, recovery-first strategy, enabling detection and providing near-instantaneous recovery of data in the event of a cyberattack. Through our industry acclaimed InfiniSafe® software, we give enterprises the capabilities to incorporate cyber storage resilience into their enterprise data infrastructure – both for primary storage and for backup workloads.

InfiniSafe is built on providing a simple, easy and very comprehensive set of capabilities to protect any data on our enterprise storage solutions, including our InfiniBox® G4 and InfiniGuard® platforms. Enterprises have successfully deployed a significant number of InfiniBox G4 and InfiniGuard systems as cyber secure backup targets. They have proven to be extremely reliable.

The InfiniBox is optimized for enterprise customers who choose to do data reduction with their backup software, while the InfiniGuard is optimized for customers who want to do data reduction in their storage layer.

We not only guarantee the immutability of our snapshots, but we also guarantee the recovery time (RTO) on our InfiniBox and InfiniBox™ SSA primary storage systems of one minute or less, regardless of dataset size. We guarantee the recovery time on our InfiniGuard® purpose-built backup appliance in 20 minutes or less, regardless of dataset size.

The performance of Infinidat’s systems as cyber secure backup targets is stellar, and our customers get great benefits from their Infinidat configurations. For example, one Global Fortune 500 customer deployed an InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe. That customer reduced the full backup window for one of their database workloads to only 30 minutes from 5 hours with their former backup target – a 10x improvement. They reduced the backup time for another workload to only 4.75 hours from 18 hours with the other vendors’ product – nearly a 4x improvement. They also saw a reduction in recovery time of 97% for full copies.

Another Fortune 500 customer replaced 36 competitors’ backup targets with 20 InfiniBox systems, using InfiniSafe for cyber storage resilience. The initial CAPEX was half of that of the competition, and in just their first year of deployment they saved >$1.5M in OPEX. All backup window SLAs and all recovery time SLAs were met or exceeded.

InfiniSafe includes truly immutable snapshots, logical and remote air-gapping, a fenced forensic environment, and near instantaneous recovery, guaranteed. As part of InfiniSafe’s cyber storage resilience stack, we also offer the ability to detect data corruption, the fingerprints of latent data corruption attacks, and other cyber issues across your data with an accuracy of up to 99.99%, leveraging AI and ML technology. This is accomplished through our InfiniSafe Cyber Detection.

Data should be protected via immutable snapshots on a scheduled basis as a baseline. But schedules leave gaps, and data center-wide cyber security software applications and the usual Security Operations Center (SOC) leave your enterprise storage out of their scanning processes. Infinidat addresses this issue through our InfiniSafe Automated Cyber Protection (ACP) capability, which is a trigger that is provided as a fully enabled container leveraging our extensive API’s and telemetry information.

InfiniSafe ACP seamlessly integrates with data center-wide cyber security applications − SIEM, SOAR, a SOC and solutions from our technical alliance partners. The Infinidat storage infrastructure is automatically alerted whenever a customer deems a security event of interest and can immediately trigger immutable snapshots, helping to reduce the threat window.

As we recognize World Backup Day, I trust that there is a realization worldwide that the type of backup that actually combats cyberattacks most effectively is not the same backup as the traditional or conventional approaches that many enterprises still utilize today.

Unlike traditional backup products that were engineered to primarily provide high ingest rates by utilizing inline deduplication techniques, Infinidat’s cyber resilient storage solutions significantly speed up recovery, enabling an enterprise to bounce back from a cyberattack with little to no damage of any kind. It’s the real power of next-generation data protection in action.

Contact Infinidat or an authorized Infinidat partner to discuss the available options of what can be done to protect your company’s data.

Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat, a Lenovo company. Prior to joining Infinidat, Herzog was CMO and VP of Global Storage Channels at IBM Storage Solutions. His executive leadership experience also includes: Senior Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for EMC’s Enterprise & Mid-range Systems Division, and CMO and Senior VP of Alliances for all-flash storage provider Violin Memory.