Maximize Operational Resilience in Financial Services

Ransomware attacks are a growing threat in today’s digital landscape, occurring every 19 seconds. For financial institutions, where service availability is paramount, the ability to recover quickly is no longer optional—it is a strategic imperative.

Addressing ransomware requires a structured approach across three phases: before, during, and after an incident. This ensures not only protection but also visibility and preparedness for swift recovery.

“We need to stop focusing solely on attack prevention and start measuring the financial impact while incidents unfold. Organizations lose an average of US$300,000 per hour during a ransomware attack,” said Alejandro Aguado, Channel Manager LATAM, Pure Storage.

Preparation Before an Attack:

Organizations must create a comprehensive recovery plan. This includes identifying secure, quarantined recovery points, ensuring infrastructure visibility, and maintaining tight control over services. Data analytics plays a vital role in assessing system health and readiness.

Action During an Attack:

Containing the attack is crucial to maintaining operations. Aguado emphasized the importance of activating disaster recovery plans and ensuring continuity of critical services.

Recovery After an Attack:

Rapid recovery, forensic investigations, and system cleanup are key priorities. Clear governance structures help define responsibilities, streamline actions, and prevent overlap during incident resolution.

This approach aligns with NIST 2.0 guidelines, which emphasize the stages of identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. Resilience, as defined by NIST, focuses on the ability to “restore services swiftly and minimize downtime.”

The increasing availability of cybercrime tools, such as ransomware-as-a-service, further amplifies risks. “The threat landscape has expanded to include not just individuals but also state-backed actors,” Aguado noted.

Modern storage solutions play a critical role in combating these threats. Metrics like Recovery Time Objective (RTO) guide organizations in determining how quickly operations can resume. Pure Storage provides adaptable security solutions tailored to meet varying operational needs and budgets.

Immutable snapshots—unchangeable, time-stamped data copies—are among the fastest recovery options. “Snapshots with immutability and no primary storage eradication offer unparalleled speed and security during recovery,” Aguado said.

The shift toward service-based storage models is accelerating. By 2028, over half of all storage systems will be service-based, with 72% of organizations already adopting cloud or hybrid-cloud strategies. “Our vision at Pure Storage is to provide a seamless, future-ready solution where your last data migration leads to a secure, timeless platform,” Aguado concluded.