• Home
• /
• Security
• /
• Securing Backups in a Zero Trust World: What You Need to Know

Securing Backups in a Zero Trust World: What You Need to Know

by    Rahul Ghundiyal   /   June 20th, 2025

The castle-and-moat era of cybersecurity is over. And the people behind the ransomware attack backup first, circumvent perimeter measures, and demand multimillion-dollar prices. Zero Trust follows the guiding principle of “never trust, always verify,” assuming all users, workloads, and network segments are hostile until proven otherwise. Because an attacker may target your final line of security as their first target, it is now imperative that you apply these ideas to backup and recovery. This article outlines the fundamental procedures that strengthen backups in a world with zero trust and directs you to contemporary platforms that follow the same end-to-end philosophy.

Why Traditional Backups Fail Against Modern Threats

Backup servers are located within the production network in legacy architectures, which also allow for unrestricted overwrite or delete operations and share administrator credentials. In just a few seconds, an attacker can erase months’ worth of restoration points by phishing a single privileged user or exploiting a forgotten server. The organization is forced to choose between downtime and a ransom payment, recovery efforts fail, and insurance prices soar. Backup infrastructure is reframed as a high-value asset that merits immutable proof, ongoing verification, and isolation under Zero Trust.

Start With Least‑Privilege for Every Human and Machine

Zero trust principles begin at the identity layer, which emphasizes the importance of granular access control for backup operations. It’s crucial to adhere to the least privilege principle and grant backup operators exactly the precise permissions they require. This means creating separate service accounts for backup proxies, securely storing human credentials, and routinely changing secrets. Completely removing shared logins is required to improve accountability and prevent unauthorized access.

Additionally, each script and API key should be thoroughly inspected to ensure that they cannot escalate beyond their intended usage. Separating roles is essential to prevent a single point of failure and potential malicious conduct; no one person should have the authority to change retention policies or delete restore points.

Consider Making Multi‑Factor Authentication (MFA) Mandatory

Ransomware’s primary first access vector is still credential theft. That danger is lowered by orders of magnitude by requiring a second element, such as a FIDO2 key, mobile push, or hardware token. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) must be linked to each privileged operation in the backup console. This covers crucial tasks like adding repositories, amending jobs, initiating mass restorations, and altering encryption keys.

Today’s identity providers enable smooth deployment by directly integrating with the majority of backup platforms. Thus, there isn’t much justification for putting off putting this crucial security step in place to protect your data.

Insist on Immutable, Object‑Locked Storage

Write-once-read-many (WORM) and object-lock features, which guarantee that even administrators cannot change or delete the data for a specified retention period, are essential to the integrity of backup data. This cryptographic immutability serves as an essential last line of defense, effectively thwarting attackers who might be able to obtain credentials but not change stored objects.

An object-based design that works with S3 and supports finer-grained access controls at the bucket level, together with horizontal scaling, further improves this security posture. This minimizes the attack surface and isolates important backup data, which is in line with Zero Trust micro-segmentation concepts.

Segment and Air‑Gap the Backup Network

Avoid allowing backup traffic to pass across production’s flat VLANs. Use jump hosts with MFA for all interactive sessions, place media servers and repositories in specific subnets, and implement stringent firewall rules. An additional hop—typically another identification realm—that an attacker must penetrate is added via a logical air gap. In highly regulated scenarios, a physical air-gapped copy still provides the best resilience; however, object-lock-based virtual air gaps yield results that are comparable but have less operational friction.

A layered defense is produced by implementing these precautions, which makes it much more difficult for an attacker to compromise backup systems. This segregation and multi-factor authentication stop critical data from being easily accessed or altered in the event of a production network compromise.

Instrument Real‑Time Detection and Alerts

Since Zero Trust presumes that a breach is unavoidable, strong detection and warning systems are essential for safeguarding data. To obtain thorough insight and receive alerts about anomalous patterns, stream backup audit trails into your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. Mass encryption on the source workload can be indicated by abrupt deletions, disabled encryption settings, or a sharp increase in changed-block data.

Moreover, entropy fluctuations inside backup files themselves can be examined by sophisticated analytics engines built into contemporary backup packages. Hours or even days before an attacker detonates their payload, this proactive research can reveal ransomware signs, enabling prompt detection and action.

Test the Recovery Playbook Relentlessly

Untested backups can’t be relied upon. Without affecting production systems, automate isolated-sandbox restores that start virtual machines and check the consistency of applications. Record each position, communication template, and escalation route. Conduct a comprehensive disaster recovery exercise twice a year, assuming that production is interrupted and that the main data centers are not accessible. Time-to-first-byte and time-to-full-service-restore are important metrics to monitor; ongoing improvement in these areas immediately reduces the impact on business in the event of an actual issue.

Evaluate Platforms Engineered for Zero Trust

A notable example of storage for Veeam that embraces Zero Trust principles is Ootbi by ObjectFirst. Specifically designed for Veeam Backup, Ootbi comes as an on-premises appliance that is immutable and resistant to ransomware. Deployment overhead is minimal—administrators can rack, stack, and power it in as little as fifteen minutes. Under the hood, it offers object lock and S3-native object storage optimized for blazingly fast backup and recovery performance. Built on Zero Trust Data Resilience (ZTDR) principles, Ootbi removes the traditional trade-offs between budget, simplicity, and security. It enables businesses to maintain safe, high-performance backup storage that holds strong even when every second counts during a ransomware attack.

Conclusion

Zero Trust is a way of thinking that requires unwavering verification, unchangeable records, and specific authorization; it is not a license line item. According to this approach, protecting backups entails segmenting networks, using immutable object storage, requiring MFA, enforcing least privilege, keeping an eye on events in real time, and practicing recovery until it becomes second nature. Contemporary solutions show that affordability, ease of use, and security can all coexist. By integrating technology, procedures, and personnel with Zero Trust principles, you can transform backups from a weak afterthought into a robust, last-resort defense against mayhem caused by ransomware.

Rahul Ghundiyal