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You know the old saying: "More data, more problems." Well, that's never been truer than in today's cloud-first world. As businesses keep piling data into the cloud, ransomware attackers are rubbing their hands together like villains in a bad movie—because there's serious money to be made.

Every year, millions of companies fall victim to ransomware, and each attack costs an average of $4.45 million. Yikes. And this isn’t just a desktop or server problem anymore—it’s a cloud problem. Attackers are now going after cloud workloads, databases, and SaaS apps, locking down critical data and demanding massive payouts.

The numbers are staggering: Ransomware accounted for 70% of reported cyberattacks in 2023, with over 317 million attempts worldwide. Even when organizations attempt to recover, they face major setbacks.

What is cloud ransomware? 

Cloud ransomware is a type of cyberattack that targets data stored in cloud environments, encrypting it and demanding a ransom for its release. Unlike traditional ransomware, which typically affects on-premises servers and endpoints, cloud ransomware exploits the unique characteristics of cloud infrastructure, such as:

• Cloud workloads & storage: Attackers encrypt databases, object storage, and cloud file systems, making critical business data inaccessible.
• Shared responsibility model gaps: Cloud providers secure infrastructure, but data protection is the customer’s responsibility, creating blind spots.
• Compromised access credentials: Weak or stolen cloud credentials allow attackers to infiltrate accounts and deploy ransomware.

And the biggest challenge? Even if you have backups, restoring from them isn’t always straightforward. Ransomware can stop backups altogether or corrupt snapshots, encrypt backups, and force organizations to revert to outdated recovery points—losing days or weeks of legitimate transactions.

Eon is helping enterprises address the threat of cloud ransomware head-on. By providing a comprehensive ransomware protection solution, Eon is helping some of the largest enterprises protect their cloud environments from ransomware and ensure they have their most critical data backed up and ready to restore should the need arise for a quick recovery. 

How does ransomware work in the cloud, and why is it so attractive to bad actors?

Cloud computing usage will continue growing in the coming years, with an annual growth rate of 16.4% expected until 2029. As attackers continue increasing their level of sophistication in cloud ransomware attacks, their pool of potential victims keeps growing.

The rapid pace of cloud adoption among enterprises positions ransomware attackers to take advantage of organizations that have not yet achieved a mature data protection strategy in their cloud environments. Many enterprises are rapidly growing their cloud environments without fully understanding the Shared Responsibility Model that cloud hyperscalers follow.

Enterprises run production workloads with data redundancy and durability, even architecting for the possibility of complex disaster recovery scenarios, without a strategy to mitigate data exfiltration or ransomware.

Why do ransomware attacks work in the cloud? 

Cloud Misconfigurations: Leaving storage buckets, databases, or virtual machines publicly exposed creates easy entry points for attackers.

Compromised Access Credentials: Phishing, credential stuffing, and other attacks exploit weak or stolen credentials, leading to Account Takeover (ATO) and unauthorized access to cloud environments.

Increased blast radius/attack surface: Many different applications and business units can share access to data when cloud environments are not properly configured according to best practices, exposing business-critical data to ransomware attacks.

Are your company’s cloud backups protected from ransomware?

As if these potential threats weren’t enough, backups are another critical area often overlooked when evaluating the possible danger of cloud ransomware. Without a logically air-gapped (LAG) vault in which cloud backups are stored, organizations risk losing the last line of defense in the event of a ransomware attack.

Here are a few ways Eon’s ransomware solution helps prevent ransomware in the first place and can help you detect and recover from it if it does happen.

Eon provides cloud ransomware protection built on the NIST framework

Identify: Eon provides a first-in-class Cloud Backup Posture Management platform that helps organizations ensure that critical data is backed up according to cyber-security, compliance, and legal requirements – no matter how vast the cloud estate is. Whether an enterprise has one cloud account with a few cloud workloads or 500 accounts containing hundreds of thousands of individual applications and data stores, Eon enables cybersecurity teams to establish standards for cloud backup posture and notifies them if those standards are being met anywhere in their organization.

Protect: By providing a true Logically Air-Gapped (LAG) Vault for cloud backups out of the box, Eon allows customers to isolate backups from source data - ensuring that in the event of a ransomware attack, backups will remain available to restore to achieve business continuity. Since Eon’s backups are immutable, they can’t be deleted or changed in the event of a ransomware attack.

Detect: Eon makes cloud backups usable by storing them in the Eon Storage Tier – this means where most vendors use cloud snapshots that are opaque as to what’s going on inside, Eon can detect ransomware and report on suspicious changes in files and directories based on entropy and other attack signatures like file extension changes.

Respond: By providing a single pane of glass view of the cloud landscape and the ability to delegate access to different features of Eon to teams with custom RBAC (role-based access control) permissions, Eon allows teams to efficiently collaborate on forming a ransomware response plan and analysis. Leveraging Eon’s inventory, file explorer, and search capabilities combined with ransomware findings, operators can discover the extent of a ransomware attack and intelligently plot a recovery plan.

Recover: In the immediate aftermath of a ransomware attack, time is of the essence. Eon’s Storage Tier allows customers to recover critical data in minutes via targeted granular restores of files and databases. For example, by leveraging Eon’s file explorer on a ransomware-compromised 16TB EBS volume, Eon allows an operator seeking to recover critical data to navigate directly to the compromised data within the volume and select the most recent backup prior to the attack. This data can then be restored individually to a secure environment in minutes. Without this targeted threat-hunting and restore functionality, the same flow could take at least several hours.

Don’t wait for an attack—secure your cloud data with Eon’s early detection, intelligent backup policies, and fast recovery capabilities. Learn more about Eon's Ransomware Protection Package

Does your cloud need ransomware protection?

Your cloud environment is growing fast. You need a smart ransomware protection package that can grow with your company. We get it – That’s why Eon’s ransomware protection package secures cloud environments from ransomware attacks by providing immutable backups, intelligent threat detection, and granular recovery to minimize downtime and data loss.

Ransomware risks aren’t slowing down anytime soon—in fact:

• The impact of ransomware is growing, projected to cost businesses globally $265 billion a year by 2031.
• Ransomware threats and attackers are getting more sophisticated, and new techniques and vulnerabilities are emerging all the time (Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report).
• On-premise security solutions haven’t kept up with the shift to the cloud and its dynamic, ever-changing environment.

What is Eon’s ransomware package?

Eon’s the first cloud-born ransomware package, built to protect your data backups.

Addresses with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), Eon’s ransomware package secures backups of databases, storage, and compute services—delivering seamless identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery of your cloud resources.

Ready to secure your cloud from ransomware with Eon?

Ransomware isn’t slowing down—43% of compromised data is permanently lost. With Eon’s cloud-native protection, you can detect threats early, safeguard backups, and recover fast—before it’s too late.

What is Multi-Cloud Backup?

Multi-cloud backup means storing your data backups across different cloud providers — like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — rather than relying on just one. This approach ensures businesses have backup copies available even if one provider experiences issues.

Think of it like having multiple safes in different locations. If one is compromised, the others keep the rest of your valuables protected. With multi-cloud backups, businesses can minimize risks, improve data accessibility, and have more control over where and how their data is stored.

Why Multi-Cloud Backups Matter?

These days companies rely on cloud infrastructure more than ever. But storing and protecting that data is getting trickier. Traditional backup strategies that depend on a single cloud provider can put organizations at risk. If that provider experiences an outage, security breach, or price hike, businesses could find themselves locked in or left scrambling for alternatives. Yikes.

That’s where multi-cloud backups come in. Instead of keeping all your eggs in one basket, this strategy spreads backup data across multiple cloud providers. This allows companies to:

• Improve resilience with fail-safe safety nets.
• Enhance data security by making “spare copies” readily available, even in the event that one storage area is compromised or encrypted.
• Boost accessibility with the flexibility to traverse and blend cloud capabilities across different providers.

Indeed, in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises that prioritize redundancy and flexibility in their backup strategies are better positioned to handle disruptions. But how exactly do multi-cloud backups work, and why are they quickly becoming the industry standard?

Why Are Multi-Cloud Backups Essential?

1. Freedom from Vendor Lock-In: Relying on a single provider can be risky. Businesses locked into one cloud often face rising costs, limited flexibility, and major hurdles when trying to migrate data. Multi-cloud backups keep companies in control, allowing them to move data where it makes the most sense for cost, performance, and compliance
2. Compliance and Security: Industries like finance, healthcare, and government agencies have strict regulations about where and how data is stored. With a multi-cloud backup strategy, businesses can ensure they meet these regulations by keeping copies of data in specific regions, complying with GDPR, HIPAA, and other data privacy laws.
   From a security perspective, multi-cloud storage also limits damage from cyber threats. If one provider suffers a breach, businesses can rely on backups stored elsewhere to keep operations running.
3. Cost Optimization and Performance: Cloud storage isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some providers are better suited for long-term archival storage at lower costs, while others offer faster retrieval for critical workloads. A multi-cloud strategy allows businesses to mix and match providers to get the best of both worlds—lowering costs while maintaining performance.
4. Better Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Cyberattacks, natural disasters, and accidental deletions happen. Multi-cloud backups add an extra layer of resilience, ensuring businesses can recover quickly without relying on physical data centers or limited disaster recovery plans.
5. Protection Against Cloud Outages: Nothing is perfect — cloud providers might  have outages that could leave businesses offline for hours (or even days). When companies store backups across multiple clouds, they have a fallback plan. If one provider goes down, operations can continue smoothly from another.

How to Implement an Effective Multi-Cloud Backup Strategy?

While multi-cloud backups offer clear advantages, managing them effectively requires a savvy strategy that prioritizes automation, standardization, and careful cost planning. Here are some key considerations for businesses considering a transition to a multi-cloud backup strategy.

• Automate backup processes. Manually managing backups across multiple cloud providers is impractical while automated backup scheduling and policy enforcement help maintain consistency and reliability.
• Ensure cross-cloud compatibility, as standardizing storage formats and backup processes ensures that backups remain portable and accessible, regardless of which cloud provider is hosting them.
• Multi-cloud backup enterprises must also be sure to optimize their cloud infrastructure for maximum security. End-to-end encryption, access controls, and regular security audits help protect multi-cloud backups from threats like unauthorized access and ransomware.
• Ongoing monitoring and regular testing are critical parts of an effective multi-cloud backup strategy. Multi-cloud backup systems should undergo frequent testing to verify recovery times, storage costs, and compliance adherence, so that enterprises are always prepared to face the worst amidst a rapidly changing digital world.

The Future of Multi-Cloud Backups

The rise of multi-cloud backup strategies reflects a larger shift in enterprises’ approach to their data — one that prioritizes resilience, security, and flexibility over rigid, single-cloud architectures. By embracing a multi-cloud approach, businesses can protect critical data from unexpected disruptions, optimize costs, and ensure compliance with evolving regulations.

As cloud environments grow more complex, organizations must invest in intelligent, automated backup solutions that help them stay ahead of threats and disruptions. Whether responding to cloud outages, cyber threats, or regulatory challenges, a well-structured multi-cloud backup strategy can serve as a key pillar of any business’ data resilience strategy in our modern world.

Engineering teams often need to conduct a live database restore to address critical scenarios – whether it’s recovering from accidental data deletion, patching specific tables impacted by data corruption, or quickly restoring lost information during a security incident. Eon’s granular restore capabilities empower enterprises to implement live database restore workflows securely and efficiently.

For teams seeking to minimize downtime and prevent disruption to ongoing operations, the ability to implement a live database restore can be imperative, particularly with mission-critical workloads that require the ability to quickly recover data from backups. With Eon, engineering teams can restore entire databases, individual tables, or even targeted query results directly into running database instances. 

Database restores with existing cloud backup providers

Legacy cloud backup solutions rely heavily on cloud snapshots for database backup and restore. But traditional cloud snapshots are ultimately just "black boxes" that necessitate a full restore of the entire database instance, even when only specific data needs to be recovered. Not only is this approach time-consuming and outdated, but it also incurs high operational and cloud storage compute power and costs, as teams must provision temporary environments and process large amounts of unused data. Existing cloud backup solutions are simply inadequate for scenarios requiring rapid, granular recovery, and are prone to leave organizations vulnerable to prolonged downtime and increased costs.

The Eon Storage Tier, built from the ground up for data protection

Eon’s global database search allows users to find tables among all their cloud environments which can then be queried without first restoring them

Eon solves the challenges of live database restores by leveraging its queryable storage tier and granular restore capabilities. These solutions enable operators to precisely recover only the data they need—whether it’s an entire database, specific tables, or targeted query results—without requiring a full restore. These critical operations can be carried out either manually by a user via the Eon console, or programmatically via the Eon API.

This streamlined approach eliminates the inefficiencies of traditional snapshot-based solutions, reducing recovery time and resource overhead. With Eon, users can implement faster, more secure database restore workflows, ensuring that backups can be restored within timeframes that align with their operational and business requirements. It offers teams an unprecedented level of flexibility and efficiency, empowering them to maintain productivity and meet critical recovery objectives with ease.

Live database restore with Eon - how does it work?

Eon allows for global search of database schemas by leveraging SQL queries of both SQL and NoSQL databases as if they are live, running, database instances. This is made possible by the Eon storage tier. When data is backed up to Eon, it is compressed, deduplicated, and stored in Eon’s cloud storage layer, engineered from the ground up with data-protection in mind. Structured data stored in the Eon Storage Tier is queryable without the need to perform full database restores. In fact, no compute or storage resources are needed prior to querying. 

How it works

• Run a SQL query to retrieve desired data
  Using the Eon Database Explorer, teams can query the Eon Storage Tier directly, without restoring a full database. Since query results can be written to an S3 bucket, you can go as granular as a single row all the way up to an entire database.
  

• Query results are copied to S3
  The results of your Database Explorer query will be securely written to a predefined S3 bucket in a customer-managed restore account. Since you control this bucket entirely, you can ensure encryption and access configuration of the bucket meet your organization’s security requirements.
  

• Insert restored data into live DB using a bastion host
  Now that the granular restore results are sitting in object storage in your own cloud environment, you can securely access them and restore them to a live running database with a bastion compute resource running in your own secure perimeter. No need to share credentials with 3rd parties.
  

And that’s all there is to it! 

Since all the above operations demonstrated in the Eon console are also available as part of our well-documented REST API, developers and operators alike can develop complex workflows, automate restores using CI/CD pipelines, and even integrate these capabilities into running applications.
Better backups for a brighter cloud future

Eon’s global search and granular restore capabilities open up a world of possibilities for our customers. Live database restore is just one of the indispensable features enabled by this fundamental component of Eon’s Cloud Backup Posture management platform – and it’s only the beginning. 

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Do you see a way you could use our Global Search or Granular Restore? Let's connect!

Eon's Approach

Eon changes the game by providing comprehensive backup support for Azure environments, empowering businesses to eliminate inefficiencies and streamline backup processes. This brings Eon’s autonomous Cloud Backup Posture Management platform to Azure users, making multi-cloud management easier and more effective than ever.

Whether you’re managing virtual machines, storage accounts, databases, or other critical workloads, Eon seamlessly integrates with Azure to ensure your data is not only protected, but also optimized and instantly accessible.

What Does Eon’s Support for Azure Backup Include?

Eon’s CBPM platform offers a range of features tailored specifically to Azure environments:

• Automated Discovery & Classification: autonomously scan your cloud environment, identifying and classifying all resources. This eliminates manual tagging and ensures nothing critical slips through the cracks.
• Policy-Driven Automation: Eon applies the appropriate backup policies based on your business and compliance needs.
• Global Search & Granular Restore: With the ability to locate and recover individual files, databases, or entire systems instantly, Eon eliminates time-consuming searches and full-volume restores. Enterprises get exactly what they need, when they need it.
• Resource Optimization: Eon’s intelligent policies eliminate redundant backups and maximize retention periods, reducing storage costs while maintaining complete data protection. Stop over or under backing up your data once and for all.
• Instant Access to Data: With Eon, you can run SQL queries directly on backed up data, without having to restore anything.
• Enhanced Security: With customizable user-based access controls, anomaly detection, and real-time notifications, Eon ensures that all Azure backups are secure and accessible only to relevant users.

By transforming Azure backup management into a seamless, efficient process, Eon allows your team to focus on innovation rather than firefighting.

How to Use Eon Backup Support for Azure?

Getting started with Eon’s Azure backup support is simple:

1. Connect Your Azure Environment: Eon is available on Azure Marketplace. Simple onboarding with usage-based billing. No appliances or agents required.
2. Start Backing Up:: After Eon has discovered some of your resources, you're ready to start backing them up.
3. Monitor & Optimize: Let Eon autonomously manage your Azure backups, continuously scanning, classifying and applying the right backup policy.
4. Recover with Precision: Whether it’s a single file, a database table, or an entire system, Eon’s global search and granular restore features ensure you can recover exactly what you need—quickly and effortlessly.

Multi-Cloud Made Simple

If you’re an enterprise, chances are you operate in a multi-cloud environment—it’s the new normal. Multi-cloud setups offer incredible flexibility and adaptability to meet fast-changing business needs. But they also come with challenges, especially when it comes to cloud backups, which have historically lagged behind the pace of innovation of other data storage solutions. That’s where Eon comes in — providing a single pane of glass for a multi-cloud environment alongside full flexibility for cross-cloud backup and recovery.

Test Out Eon Backup for Azure

Want to experience the future of cloud backup management for yourself? Schedule a demo today to see how Eon can transform your Azure environment into a streamlined, secure, and cost-effective operation.

Azure users, it’s time to rethink what’s possible for your cloud backups. With Eon’s CBPM platform, managing backups in your Azure environment is no longer a chore — it’s an opportunity to innovate and future-proof your operations.

Because when it comes to the cloud, your data is only as strong as your backup strategy.

Schedule your demo today and discover how Eon can revolutionize your approach to Azure backups.