AI-Powered Storage Cyber Resilience

Enabling modern cyber resilience with IBM Storage

This white paper, commissioned by IBM and produced by Omdia, explores why AI-powered storage resiliency is becoming essential for modern cybersecurity strategies. Drawing on Omdia research and industry insights, the report explains how organisations can strengthen resilience by embedding security, detection, and recovery capabilities directly within their enterprise storage infrastructure.

Enabling Modern Cyber-Resilience with IBM Storage explores how organisations can improve their ability to detect cyber threats early, protect critical data, and recover operations quickly following an attack.

Key research findings of the report snapshot

The research highlights the scale of today’s cybercrime epidemic and why organisations must prioritise resilience.

• 93% of organisations experienced an attempted ransomware attack in the past year
• 35% of organisations experienced ransomware attacks weekly
• 22% reported daily ransomware attempts
• 88% of IT leaders consider ransomware a top five business risk
• 85% of ransomware attacks go undetected for more than 24 hours
• 99% of organisations that experienced successful ransomware attacks lost data
• 45% recovered only half their data or less
• 75% of attacks cost between $500,000 and $4.99 million, highlighting the significant financial and operational impact of cyber incidents.

Why cyber resilience must start with data

Modern cyberattacks increasingly focus on disrupting access to critical business data. According to the report, digital data represents the lifeblood of modern organisations, supporting everything from operational systems to intellectual property and customer information.

Without access to trusted data:

• Applications cannot run
• Business processes fail
• Operational disruption spreads rapidly

As a result, enterprise storage infrastructure plays a central role in cyber-resilience strategies, enabling organisations to detect threats earlier and recover data more quickly.

The growing role of storage in cyber resilience

Traditional cybersecurity tools often focus on preventing attacks at the network or application layer. However, ransomware attacks frequently target backup environments and storage systems directly.

To improve resilience, organisations are increasingly embedding protection capabilities directly into storage environments, including:

• Immutable Data Protection: Creating backup copies that cannot be modified or deleted, ensuring clean recovery points are always available.
• Air-gapped Backups: Isolating backup environments from production systems to prevent attackers from compromising recovery data.
• Continuous Backup Validation: Regularly verifying backups and snapshots to ensure they remain usable for recovery.
• Early Threat Detection: Monitoring storage-level activity to identify abnormal behaviour that may indicate a ransomware attack.

These capabilities enable organisations to detect attacks earlier and minimise the damage caused by compromised systems.

AI-Driven storage resilience with IBM

The report also highlights how IBM is embedding advanced resilience capabilities into its storage portfolio.

Two key technologies are explored in the white paper:

1) IBM FlashSystem

• IBM FlashSystem provides high-performance enterprise storage designed to support critical workloads such as databases, analytics, virtualisation, and disaster recovery.
• FlashSystem incorporates AI-based ransomware detection, using analytics built into IBM FlashCore Modules to monitor storage activity patterns.
• This technology can detect potential ransomware behaviour in less than a minute, enabling organisations to trigger protective actions such as creating immutable snapshots for recovery.

2) IBM Storage Defender

IBM Storage Defender provides software-based protection designed to enhance data resilience and rapid recovery.

Key capabilities include:

• AI-driven anomaly detection
• Unified visibility across storage environments
• Integration with security platforms such as SIEM tools
• Automated recovery workflows
• Support for forensic investigation environments

Together, these capabilities help organisations detect threats earlier and restore business operations more quickly.

A multi-layered approach to data resilience

When deployed together, IBM FlashSystem and IBM Storage Defender provide multiple layers of protection across storage infrastructure.

This integrated approach enables organisations to:

• Detect potential ransomware attacks early
• Protect data using immutable snapshots
• Isolate compromised data
• Recover operations rapidly
• Maintain compliance with evolving cybersecurity regulations

By embedding resilience into storage infrastructure itself, organisations can move beyond traditional cybersecurity approaches and adopt a proactive data-centric resilience strategy.

The report will cover:

• Why cyberattacks are becoming inevitable
• How AI is transforming ransomware detection
• Why storage infrastructure is critical to cyber resilience
• How organisations can build stronger data protection strategies

Download the report to learn how AI-powered storage can strengthen your organisation’s cyber resilience.

Read more on the Cyber Resilience IBM FlashSystem campaign page.