NetApp announces industry-leading enterprise storage with AI-powered ransomware detection
Next-generation machine learning technology dramatically increases precision and recall
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Jason Blosil
Ransomware attacks come in many forms and can enter your business in many ways. Data storage is your last line of defense to protect your sensitive data against ransomware attacks. Today marks a significant milestone as NetApp announces our next generation of enterprise storage with real-time AI-powered ransomware detection. Powered by our latest machine learning technology, NetApp will deliver sophisticated ransomware detection unmatched by any other enterprise storage vendor. This ransomware protection is a major leap in technology, achieving a planned greater than 99% recall (the ability to identify threats) and precision (the ability to distinguish false positives and false negatives). With NetApp, you can have the power to protect your data and mitigate today's threats and the unknown threats of tomorrow, wherever your data lives.
NetApp was the first enterprise storage vendor to help you prevent ransomware attacks with on-box automated ransomware detection (ARP), introduced in NetApp® ONTAP® in 2021. Since then, our customers have been adopting ONTAP ARP at a rapid pace, empowering them to detect threats to critical data and then take automated steps to minimize damage.
Next-generation autonomous ransomware protection
Using the latest machine learning technology built in to ONTAP, the next generation of ONTAP autonomous ransomware protection (ARP/AI) will offer near real-time detection of ransomware attacks—from file entropy changes, extensions, header manipulations, partial encryption, and more. The ability to more rapidly detect a broader range of threats helps achieve a faster response, which is crucial to reducing your overall liability, and it also enables faster data restore and operational recovery.
Regular and timely updates to model parameters can be self-deployed to your ONTAP storage nondisruptively, providing a seamless way to maintain model currency without having to upgrade your ONTAP software or reboot your storage. ARP/AI is truly a game changer for those looking to stay ahead of cybercriminals. Customers already using the current version of ONTAP ARP can continue to do so, because ONTAP ARP/AI can be deployed without disruption once the system is upgraded to the supported ONTAP version.
The next generation of ONTAP autonomous ransomware protection delivers the following benefits:
- Near real-time AI-powered threat detection to reduce your liability and enable faster recovery. This capability improves on the previous implementation, which relied on a set of heuristics created during a “learning period.”
- Greater than 99% planned precision and recall—an industry first that relies on the new machine learning models.
- Enhanced detection of a wide variety of ransomware attacks.
- Nondisruptive updates to model parameters that are seamless and can be done at any time, independent of ONTAP release cycles.
The case for better threat detection
Early detection of cyberthreats is crucial to mitigating the damage of ransomware attacks, and organizations of all sizes are planning to invest in more intelligent detection technologies. According to a recent survey of over 160 CISOs by Evaluator Group, “CISOs struggle to detect attacks and find the last known good copy of data for recovery, along with bare minimum recovery expected to take hours with full recovery expected to take weeks or months, often resulting in data that is forever lost due to malicious corruption.”
As a result, 71% of the respondents stated that earlier detection of ransomware attacks is what they want most moving forward. And “two-thirds of the respondents said they plan to add data analytics and/or machine learning tools to detect suspicious activity over the next year.”
Are you ready?
Availability
ARP/AI complements NetApp’s class-leading portfolio of AI-powered protection, detection, and recovery solutions and is planned to be available as a technology preview in the second quarter of 2024. Customers with the ONTAP One license will benefit from this new feature without additional charge. This capability is of such high value that we are announcing availability early to allow a few of our customers to sign up for the tech preview and prepare for qualification and deployment in their environments.
AI is changing the world. And NetApp continues to pioneer the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to power the industry’s most sophisticated cyberdefenses. There is no safer place to store and protect your data than NetApp.
Next steps
Read more about NetApp Cyber Resilience solutions.
Jason Blosil
Jason is a business and marketing professional with over 20 years of product marketing, product management, and corporate finance experience. Since joining NetApp in 2008 he has been focused on SAN and NAS storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions, and cloud data services. When not in the office, you can find him cycling, cooking, enjoying time with family, and volunteering at his church and in the community.
