NetApp's new Ransomware Resilience service and expanded partnerships with public cloud providers further highlight its widening focus beyond data storage.
Enterprise IT organizations under pressure to respond to ransomware gained another potential tool for their arsenal this week from NetApp, which also added to its multi-cloud caching options.
The new Ransomware Resilience service and cloud partnership updates, launched during the annual NetApp Insight conference, continued a campaign that began last year to diversify the vendor's strategy beyond data storage into higher-level data management. Other updates this week included an AI Data Engine in preview that can collect, curate, apply governance and supply data for AI apps.
"We are delivering … the data supply chain for the agentic era, [a] metadata fabric that turns raw data into knowledge irrespective of where it lives," said Syam Nair, chief product officer at NetApp, during a keynote presentation Oct. 14.
Ransomware Resilience replaces the previous NetApp Ransomware Protection service, adding data breach detection that identifies user and file system behaviors consistent with data exfiltration. It also added features that can block suspicious users from all instances of NetApp storage, launch an isolated recovery environment and walk users through workload restoration. The previous service could detect anomalous activity and warn of a potential ransomware attack.
"Resilience is no longer a check box. It's a continuous posture built into the NetApp data platform," Nair said during his presentation. "Resilience needs to travel with the data."
Previously, NetApp offered a ransomware recovery guarantee, but has moved away from that with Ransomware Resilience. According to text in italics at the bottom of its Oct. 14 press release, "No ransomware detection or prevention system can completely guarantee safety from a ransomware attack. Although it's possible that an attack might go undetected, NetApp technology acts as an important additional layer of defense, and our research indicates NetApp technology has resulted in a high degree of detection for certain file encryption-based ransomware attacks."
Enterprises face rising ransomware pressure
NetApp is somewhat unique in developing its own ransomware protection, while competitors Dell, IBM, Hitachi Vantara and Infinidat have integrated CyberSense from partner Index Engines to offer similar features, said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
"IT orgs are still learning about the role they play, but that role looks set to be increasingly important as part of a defense-in-depth approach," he said.
Ransomware Resilience reflects increasingly sophisticated [attacks], targeting not just data but also backups.
Philip BuesAnalyst, IDC
According to Philip Bues, an analyst at IDC, this transition is happening in part because ransomware and other cyberattacks continue to rise despite the measures already taken to address them.
"Ransomware Resilience reflects increasingly sophisticated [attacks], targeting not just data but also backups," Bues said. "Disruptions can last days or weeks, causing lost revenue, reputational damage and regulatory penalties. IDC ransomware research shows that the ability to recover files from backup without paying a ransom has decreased."
Despite the fever pitch of AI hype in the enterprise tech industry this year, cybersecurity still tops the list of IT buyers' strategic spending priorities, according to Omdia research. Of 351 respondents to the firm's 2025 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, 59% said cybersecurity had become significantly more important to their company's spending plans over the last two years. Improving security and resilience against cyberattacks was the top justification for IT investments for 45% of respondents.
NetApp touts 'global consistency' in the cloud
NetApp also bolstered its pursuit of disaggregated management for AI data with fresh cloud provider support for its distributed storage features. Google Cloud will preview NetApp block storage for select customers of its Google Cloud NetApp Volumes (GCNV), which also underpins the new Google Gemini Enterprise service. GCNV and Azure NetApp Files now support NetApp's FlexCache and SnapMirror, which was already supported by AWS FSx for NetApp.
"Link your data across on-prem and every cloud, a global namespace on a unified data plane … spanning all major clouds," Nair said. "It's smart caching, enabling read and write, so teams can work independently, locally, but have global consistency. There are no external appliances here, no gateways, no synthetic file system. It's native in each cloud service built into ONTAP, and there's no additional cost."
NetApp's data management strategy is ambitious, and its longstanding public cloud partnerships will help with that, Robinson said. However, it remains to be seen if the company can broaden the appeal of its products beyond its existing customer base.
"NetApp is still regarded as a filer company in many respects," Robinson said. "It wants to be seen as a data platform. And one of the problems, obviously, is that everybody's saying they're a data platform these days."
Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.
