Bouncing Back from a Ransomware Attack to a Minimum Viable Business

The landscape of business continuity has undergone a significant transformation with the evolution from traditional Disaster Recovery (DR) to the more complex realm of Cyber Recovery (CR). Where DR once focused on mitigating the impact of natural disasters like floods or power outages, CR now contends with targeted cyber-attacks that pose an ever-present threat. For cybersecurity leaders and C-suite executives, the mission is clear: restore a minimum viable business (MVB)—the core operations that sustain viability—amidst chaos.

CR requires critical preliminary steps before recovery can even begin. Unlike DR, where recovery is often the easiest part, CR involves properly detecting the incident, containing the attack to prevent its spread, and eradicating the threat actor to avoid double extortion. This multi-layered response underscores why CR poses a significantly tougher challenge than its DR counterpart. Ransomware isn’t just an IT headache—it’s a boardroom crisis.

Minimum Viable Business: What Really Happens During a Cyber Recovery

Recovery is a strategic race to revive your MVB—those critical systems (e.g., financials, patient records) that keep the business alive. It’s important to understand what actually happens during a CR.

1. Timeline Detective Work: Forensics experts build a timeline to spot affected servers, files, and backdoors—think of it as mapping a crime scene. Veeam’s Recon tool helps pinpoint the scope of the attack and what was impacted.

2. Pinpoint the Safe Spot: Cybersecurity identifies a pre-compromise window (within days) to validate a clean restore before the threat actor was in the environment. This is passed onto the data protection team to validate a clean restore point.

3. Hand It Over: The data protection team takes over, selecting a restore point before the breach. Teamwork here cuts recovery time, targeting key systems to get your MVB running.

4. Cleanroom Check: Backups are tested in a secure cleanroom with Veeam SureBackup, Threat Hunter and any other in-house cybersecurity forensic tools, verifying they’re free of malware. This step ensures no hidden threats derail your MVB.

5. Mass Restore Kickoff: With dwell time going down to single digit days and in some cases hours, Veeam’s multi-layer system—failover replicas, instant recovery from backups, and instant recovery with storage integration—rolls out the fix at scale. It prioritizes restoring your MVB, like bringing online financial or patient records.

6. Fast Recovery Wins: Veeam slashes Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) with speed. The image shows how antivirus and backup repos team up, ensuring your MVB is operational while full recovery continues.

Real Talk: What Works

Practice beats panic, especially when aiming for an MVB. Teams that drill with Veeam’s tools recover fastest. Rushing restores without checks can stretch downtime from hours to days, delaying your MVB. Test backups monthly and train your team to spot early signs—panic clicks can wipe evidence needed to prioritize your MVB.

The focus on MVB means starting with essentials—say, a retailer’s point-of-sale system or a hospital’s patient intake—before tackling less urgent data. This staged approach, supported by Veeam’s layered recovery, keeps business flowing.

A Vision for Data Resilience

The future of CR lies in preemptive readiness. Define your MVB today—identify which systems are non-negotiable—and build a culture of resilience. Veeam’s free trial and cleanroom technology offer a starting point, but true leadership means integrating CR into your risk strategy, engaging stakeholders, and staying ahead of evolving threats.