Securing Your Cyber Vault: How Observability and NDR Turn Blind Spots into Confidence
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In the ongoing battle for cyber resilience, organizations are increasingly turning to a final line of defense: the cyber vault. This isolated, hardened, and immutable data sanctuary is designed to be the ultimate failsafe; the place you turn when all else fails. It holds the pristine copies of your critical data, ready to restore operations after a devastating ransomware attack or wiper event.
But a critical question often gets overlooked: How do you know your vault is still secure when you need it most? How can you create additional assurance around your key capabilities?
An attacker's ultimate goal isn't just to encrypt your production environment; it's to render your ability to recover useless. This means your backup infrastructure is a high-value target, and in turn, your cyber vault and isolated recovery environments are also targets that adversaries will be seeking out. If an adversary can compromise the vault or the data within it before you initiate a recovery, your last line of defense may be rendered useless.
This is where the partnership between World Wide Technology (WWT) and ExtraHop becomes important for any organization's cyber resilience strategy.
The attacker's blind spot is your best defense
Cyber vaults are, by design, isolated. Access is severely restricted, and communication windows are tightly controlled. However, this isolation can create a blind spot if you do not have observability with a Network Detection & Response (NDR) tool. Traditional security tools that rely on agents or log files might not have visibility into the network pathways leading to and from the vault. Additionally, observability with NDR is another layer in your Defense-in-Depth posture, creating a more thorough security lens for recovered workloads within the vault.
This visibility gap is an area that attackers could exploit across environments. It can be a gap that an insider would exploit if a Vault or IRE exists. Attackers perform reconnaissance, move laterally across your network, and escalate privileges, all while attempting to find a way to access or compromise your recovery capabilities, leveraging protocols and pathways commonly used within your network.
ExtraHop's RevealX platform, a leader in Network Detection and Response (NDR), eliminates this blind spot. By analyzing all network traffic in real-time—including the connections to and within your vault—ExtraHop provides the verified and measured truth of who is communicating with what, when, and how.
How NDR ensures your vault is ready for recovery
WWT's Cyber Resilience practice excels at architecting and implementing robust vault solutions. Integrating an NDR tool like ExtraHop into the Zero Trust (ZT) architecture adds a critical layer of consistent monitoring and assurance that the vault remains uncompromised. Here's how:
1. Establishing a "golden" baseline
You can't spot abnormal behavior if you don't know what normal looks like. ExtraHop uses advanced machine learning to automatically baseline the expected communication patterns (including SSL and modern AD-encrypted protocols) for your cyber vault. It learns:
- Who: Which specific backup servers and administrative consoles are authorized to connect?
- What: What protocols (SMB, NFS, etc.) are used for data replication?
- When: Are connections only happening during the sanctioned, overnight backup window?
- How Much: What is the typical volume of data transferred?
Any deviation from this established "golden" baseline immediately triggers an alert. An administrator logging in from an unknown workstation at 3:00 PM? A server attempting to connect using an unauthorized protocol like RDP, PSexec? NDR allows you to see it instantly.
2. Continuous monitoring of the "air gap"
While a cyber vault aims for an "air-gapped" state, data must periodically cross the boundary to be backed up. This brief window is a moment of potential exposure. ExtraHop provides out-of-band 24/7 monitoring of the network segments connected to the vault, acting as a vigilant digital guard. It can detect subtle but critical indicators of compromise, such as:
- Lateral Movement: An attacker attempting to use a compromised server on the production network to probe the backup infrastructure.
- Unusual Protocol Usage: The appearance of unexpected protocols, which could signal an attacker's attempt to exfiltrate data or deploy malware.
- Reconnaissance Activity: Network scans or discovery attempts targeting the vault's management interfaces.
3. Pre-recovery validation and confidence
This is the most critical moment. A catastrophic cyber event has occurred, and your executive team is asking, "Can we trust our backups?"
Malware, vulnerability and threat detection is a core tenet and function of the vault or Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE). Before you press the big red "recover" button, your security team can turn to ExtraHop for definitive answers. By reviewing the network traffic history, they can validate with high confidence that no unauthorized access, suspicious connections, or data exfiltration attempts have targeted the vault. This forensic evidence allows you to:
- Verify the integrity of the communication channels.
- Confirm that only sanctioned replication jobs have occurred.
- Proceed with recovery, knowing the data you're restoring hasn't been tampered with or booby-trapped with dormant malware.
This ability to validate the security of your vault before recovery transforms a high-stakes gamble into a data-driven decision, dramatically reducing your recovery time objective (RTO) and instilling confidence in the process.
4. Recovery in the vault or Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE)
Malware, vulnerability and threat detection is a core tenet and function of the vault or Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE) itself. Ensuring that there are no hidden threats that were potentially missed by other security tooling is essential to the security of the vaulted environment. This assists in answering the question "Can we trust our recovered workloads?" Defense in Depth, layered security with a Zero Trust mindset, is key outside of the vault, as well as inside. Never trust, always verify.
5. Pre-recovery validation of production/recovery environments
Once the Cyber Vault and Isolated Recovery Environment are instantiated for recovery of the Minimum Viable Business (MVB), the organization will next need to evaluate where it will expand. Will we buy new equipment? Will we wipe and rebuild existing infrastructure?
Why cyber resilience matters
Cyber resilience is about ensuring that organizations can anticipate, withstand, recover from and adapt to cyberattacks while maintaining business continuity. It blends cybersecurity (detect, respond, contain) with business resilience (performance visibility, rapid recovery, operational continuity).
RevealX helps by unifying Network Detection & Response (NDR) with Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) on the same high-fidelity packet data. This provides a single source of truth for both threat detection and operational stability.
Cyber resilience highlights with RevealX
ExtraHop strengthens cyber resilience in modern architectures by providing deep, real-time visibility across all network traffic—on-prem, cloud, and hybrid. Its network detection and response (NDR) platform analyzes east-west and north-south traffic at line speed, giving security teams the ability to spot behavioral anomalies, identify lateral movement, and detect threats that traditional endpoint or log-based tools miss.
By leveraging machine learning and continuous packet-level monitoring, ExtraHop helps organizations rapidly investigate suspicious activity, reduce dwell time, and respond to incidents with greater accuracy. In distributed, API-driven, and containerized environments where blind spots are common, ExtraHop provides a unified, protocol-level view that strengthens detection capabilities and supports a more resilient, zero-trust-aligned security posture.
Example: Ransomware + business continuity
ExtraHop RevealX boosts cyber resilience by giving organizations real-time visibility into all network activity. Because it monitors packets directly, RevealX can identify early signs of ransomware—such as unusual file access, lateral movement, or rogue command-and-control traffic—often before endpoint tools detect anything.
With behavioral analytics and machine learning, RevealX quickly identifies suspicious patterns and alerts teams to take action. Early detection helps prevent ransomware from spreading and reduces potential damage.
RevealX also enhances business continuity by accelerating investigations. Its packet-level forensics show exactly what happened and which systems were affected, allowing teams to contain incidents quickly. Through integrations with SIEM and SOAR tools, RevealX can automate containment actions, keeping operations running smoothly during response efforts.
In short: RevealX improves ransomware resilience by detecting attacks earlier, reducing downtime, and helping organizations maintain business operations even during an incident.
The WWT & ExtraHop advantage
Building a resilient enterprise requires more than just technology; it requires a proven architecture and the expertise to integrate it flawlessly. WWT's cyber resilience experts leverage the state-of-the-art Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to design, test, and validate vault architectures that incorporate ExtraHop's powerful NDR capabilities.
Through hands-on labs and proofs of concept, we can demonstrate precisely how RevealX will provide the visibility needed to protect your most critical recovery asset.
Don't let your last line of defense be a question mark. Ensure your digital safe deposit box is truly safe. Contact your WWT account team today to learn more about architecting a secure and verifiable Cyber Vault with ExtraHop.
Take a look at the following content for additional content and a broader overview of Cyber Resilience, NDR and Zero Trust -
Accelerate Zero Trust Adoption with ExtraHop RevealX
Digital Disasters: How Does Cyber Resilience Differ from Conventional Disaster Recovery?