Ransomware Protection with Air Gap 

^{This blog was updated in October 2025.}

A ransomware attack is far more likely to occur today than ever before, and any organization could fall victim. According to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report, 67 new ransomware variants were identified in 2024 alone, demonstrating the rapidly evolving threat landscape that organizations must defend against.

Ransomware complaints increased by 9% in 2024, with cybercrime losses reaching $16.6 billion – a 33% increase from 2023, the report revealed. If companies fall victim to an attack not only may it affect revenue, but it may also hurt their brand.

Air Gapping as a Deterrent to Ransomware Attacks

Air gapping adds a layer of security to help safeguard your data and mitigate ransomware risk. It is designed to isolate and segment secondary or tertiary backup copies and make them inaccessible from the public portions of the environment.

If your organization is infiltrated by ransomware or a malicious attacker, the cyber threat will have a limited attack surface. The public portions of the environment may get infected, but the isolated data will not because it cannot be accessed, changed, or deleted. The backups are safe, secure, and available for restoration.

Compare air gap to defending a medieval castle. The castle is surrounded by water, and the only access to the castle is if the drawbridge is let down periodically to bridge the gap. By storing a backup copy on a storage infrastructure that is physically inaccessible from an external connection, you restrict access and drastically limit the potential for infection.

Commvault Simplifies Air Gapping of Backup Data

Commvault® Cloud leverages a multi-layered approach to ransomware readiness, providing robust controls to help prevent threats and keep data available and recoverable from cyberattack. With immutable, air-gapped data copies, anomaly detection, and built-in encryption, Commvault helps safeguard critical data across apps, endpoints, on-prem, and cloud environments.

Air Gap Protect is a fully managed cloud storage target, offering security and scale for organizations adopting cloud storage. Available with Backup and Recovery, as well as with the SaaS hybrid cloud portfolio, Air Gap Protect makes it simple to leverage cloud storage – without a steep learning curve – for air-gapped ransomware protection and optimized costs.

Top challenges of cloud-based ransomware protection:

• Increasing cloud costs with cloud expansion and cloud deployments
• Reliable ransomware protection with a secure, air-gapped, offsite data copy
• Trusted backup and recoverability of an organization’s most valuable asset: data

Commvault Cloud offers industry-leading durability, security, scalability, and performance, capable of protecting business data from today’s and tomorrow’s cyberthreats.

Key benefits of Air Gap Protect:

• Ransomware and risk reduction
• Capacity growth
• Effectively manage cloud costs
• Hybrid cloud adoption
• Secondary backup copies

Flexible Storage Architecture

Air Gap Protect’s Frequent Access and Infrequent Access Storage options deliver flexibility for cloud storage deployments. This tiered architecture enables organizations to optimize their backup strategies based on specific use cases, recovery time objectives, and retention policies.

Frequent Access Storage serves as the ideal foundation for primary backup repositories where rapid data retrieval is required. Organizations that need quick access to recent backups for daily operations, frequent restores, or active data management will find this tier suited to their immediate recovery needs. The enhanced performance characteristics help enable minimal downtime during critical restore operations.

Infrequent Access Storage provides a cost-effective solution for secondary storage requirements, particularly for organizations implementing longer-term retention policies or compliance-driven storage needs. This tier excels at storing data that may be accessed less frequently but remains crucial for regulatory compliance, historical analysis, or disaster recovery scenarios.

With ransomware threats continuing to evolve and financial impacts reaching record levels, implementing air gap protection is no longer optional – it’s essential for business continuity. Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect provides the modern approach to air gapping that organizations need: combining the security benefits of traditional air gap methods with the accessibility and scalability required for today’s business environments.

For more details, refer to the Air Gap Protect solution brief.