A Silver Lining to Ransomware in 2025 : Dwell Time is Plummeting

Are you tired of hearing scary ransomware statistics? You’re not alone. It’s an epidemic among vendors, and the fear-mongering can feel relentless. Joking aside, we all know ransomware is a persistent, damaging threat. Let’s skip the usual data points proving its impact and focus on a rare bright spot: dwell time is dropping dramatically. This shift is transforming how organizations combat ransomware, and with Veeam’s storage integrations, it’s easier than ever to turn this silver lining into a recovery superpower.

Dwell Time From Months to Hours

Dwell time is the period a threat actor lurks undetected in your environment. Attackers would spend months encrypting workloads before dropping the dreaded ransom note. This left organizations in a bind: backups often contained corrupted data, and even if a clean restore point existed from 30+ days ago, losing a month’s worth of data was catastrophic for business continuity.

Fast forward to 2025, and Coveware by Veeam reports dwell times shrinking to days or even hours. Why? More frequent audits, behavioral detection, and the rise of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) toolkits have changed the game. These toolkits follow predictable patterns, compromising systems, moving laterally with living-off-the-land tools, and encrypting or exfiltrating data. While this makes attacks faster, it also means the ability to recover from more than just backup.

Veeam: Recovery From More Than Backup

So, why is shorter dwell time a win for ransomware victims? When attackers linger for only days or hours, your recovery options multiply. Most organizations maintain multiple Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), such as 24-hour replicas or 3-day storage snapshots, which are far faster than restoring from traditional backups. Veeam unifies these recovery layers into a single, powerful platform. Paired with a mature incident response plan, Veeam delivers a 2x reduction in downtime and 3x faster RTOs, ensuring your business bounces back before the damage spirals.

Cutting Downtime with Veeam Storage Integration

When ransomware strikes, restoring a minimum viable business (MVB) as quickly as possible is the goal. Automation and pre-planned scenarios can shave hours if not days. Recovering from storage snapshots is lightning-fast once data is moving, but without orchestration, manual steps create bottlenecks. Imagine your MVB requires 500 VMware VMs, with downtime costing your organization $1 million per hour. With dwell times of 1-2 days, snapshots become your recovery lifeline. Without Veeam, you face:

• Hours mapping 500 VMs to their respective datastores.

• Mounting 30-50 datastores, each taking precious minutes.

• Manually powering off original VMs to avoid IP conflicts, registering new VMs, and powering them on.

Veeam eliminates this grunt work with seamless storage integrations for Pure Storage, NetApp, Dell, IBM, HPE, and more. Clients are amazed at how effortlessly Veeam:

• Locates LUNs on the array.

• Identifies snapshots of those LUNs.

• Finds VMs within snapshots.

• Instantly recovers VMs in parallel, no datastore mapping required.

This automation transforms a multi-hour slog into a process that takes 15-30 minutes, minimizing downtime and restoring critical operations before the business feels the full sting.

Cyber Recovery Done Right

In 2025, cyber recovery (CR) is far more common than traditional disaster recovery. Moving data is only half the battle. Ensuring it’s clean is critical. Veeam’s Threat Hunter and YARA rules integrate forensic analysis and isolation into a cleanroom environment, verifying data integrity before migration to production. This automated approach further reduces downtime and accelerates RTOs, ensuring your recovery isn’t just fast but secure.

Conclusion: Turn the Silver Lining Into Gold

While shorter dwell times offer a silver lining, ransomware remains a formidable threat. The best defense? Be better prepared. According to Veeam’s Data Resilience Maturity Model, 74% of organizations miss key resilience best practices, and over 30% of CIOs overestimate their preparedness. Veeam’s storage integrations and cyber recovery tools automate critical steps, delivering recovery that goes beyond backup. Don’t just survive ransomware. Thrive through it.