Cyber Resilience with the VAST AI Operating System

Recover from Any Attack in Minutes, Not Days

Ransomware crews now hunt the backups before they touch production. VAST DataStore keeps immutable snapshots on the primary all-flash tier or backup images from one of our supported partner solutions, under a retention policy no stolen credential can override. When an attack detonates, you verify a known-clean point in time, roll it back at flash speed, and keep the business running.

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Cyber Resilience with the VAST AI Operating System
The Recovery Gap

When the Attack happens, the Clock Starts and Recovery Speed Matters

Ransomware has moved past prevention. Attackers dwell for weeks, encrypt the backup catalog first, and detonate the primary payload when it hurts most. The question is no longer whether an attack gets in, but how fast you can bring back a copy you can trust. For most teams the answer is measured in days on slow disk and tape, while the business sits idle and the ransom clock runs.

Backups Are the First Target

Modern attacks hunt the backup catalog before the production data. Once the recovery copies are encrypted or deleted, the last line of defense is gone and the ransom demand becomes the only path left.

Restore Takes Days, Not Minutes

Recovering petabytes of data from deduplicated disk or an offsite tape vault is bottlenecked at a few hundred megabytes per second. Critical systems stay dark for days while revenue, trust, and regulatory clocks all keep running.

You Cannot Trust the Copy

Weeks of dwell time mean the payload may already live inside your snapshots. Without immutable, verifiable points in time, recovery risks reinfecting the environment with the exact malware you are trying to remove.

Federal missions demand cyber platforms that scale, adapt and reduce analyst burden. By pairing Leidos’ cyber tradecraft with the NVIDIA AI stack and the VAST AI OS, we’re eliminating slow, manual steps that stall response.

Josh Salmanson
Vice President and Cybersecurity Practice Lead, Leidos
Why Now

Cyberattacks strike instantly. Recoveries still take ages.

One side accelerated. The other did not. Automated ransomware encrypts a petabyte estate in hours, propagating across shares at the speed of the network. Recovery still runs at the pace of a restore job: read every byte off a slow tier, reassemble it, and hope the copy is clean.

That asymmetry is the whole problem. Encryption finishes in an afternoon. The restoration takes two weeks. So the attacker sets the terms. The ransom demand is priced against your downtime, and your downtime is a function of how slowly your recovery tier moves data. Distance and slow media, once treated as protection, now just widen the gap.

Here is the turn. Recovery has to move as fast as the attack. VAST DataStore runs on a Disaggregated and Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, where every CNode reaches every SSD across the namespace. Immutable recovery points sit on that same all-flash namespace as production, held by a retention policy no administrator or root credential can shorten. Reverting to a clean point in time becomes a metadata operation on flash rather than a byte-by-byte rehydration across tiers.

Symmetry restored. Recovery finishes on the same clock as the attack, so downtime no longer sets the ransom price.

VAST Data image
Cyber Resilience on VAST DataStore

Immutable by Default, Recoverable at Flash Speed

VAST DataStore treats resilience as a property of the platform, not a by-product bolted on afterwards. Snapshots are immutable and space-efficient and roll back at flash speed. The mechanism is the Element Store on the DASE architecture: every point in time is a native Element under a retention policy that no credential can delete before it expires.

Lock Data Against Ransomware

With object lock and immutable snapshots, your data is protected by policies that not even a compromised root or admin credential can alter, bypass, or delete.  An attacker who steals your keys still cannot delete the clean copies before they expire.

Catch Mass-Encryption Early

Native indexing and event visibility across the namespace surface abnormal change rates and mass-encryption patterns early, so you catch the payload before it spreads across the estate.

Limitless scale, Lightning Performance

Recover petabytes in minutes instead of rehydrating for days from disk or tape.

Confirm Data is Clean Before Recovering

Never reintroduce the same payload during recovery by mounting and scanning any snapshot in place or leveraging your Data Protection solution to confirm data is clean before you recover it.

How VAST Delivers Cyber Resilience

Protection and Recovery on One All-Flash Tier

Three architectural choices separate VAST from the backup-appliance model: immutability enforced beneath the credential layer, recovery measured in minutes because it never leaves flash, and durability that survives hardware failure and attack alike.

Unbeatable Immutability

Unbeatable Immutability

Traditional immutability lives in software that a stolen administrator credential can reconfigure or switch off. VAST DataStore enforces snapshot retention as a policy the management plane itself cannot revoke, so a locked snapshot cannot be shortened, altered, or deleted by any account, including root, until its retention expires. Snapshots are redirect-on-write and space-efficient, so keeping hundreds of granular recovery points costs a fraction of a full copy. The result is a set of recovery points that stay trustworthy even after an attacker holds full control of the environment.

Why VAST DataStore for cyber resilience?

The Primary Tier That Recovers Itself

VAST DataStore persists files, objects, and volumes as native Elements in one global namespace on the DASE architecture. Because resilience lives inside that namespace rather than in a separate backup silo, you protect and recover the same data you serve, at the same performance, without a second estate to license, power, and manage.

Indestructible Snapshots

Redirect-on-write, space-efficient snapshots with policy-enforced retention that no credential can override. Keep hundreds of granular recovery points on the primary tier without a full-copy penalty.

Flash-Speed Rollback

Revert entire datasets to a clean point in time as a metadata operation on all-flash. Petabyte recovery completes in minutes, so the business is back before the ransom clock matters.

One Tier, No Backup Silo

Protection and recovery run on the same namespace that serves production. Retire the separate deduplication appliances and offsite vaults, and cut the power, footprint, and license cost of a second estate.

Why VAST DataSpace for resilience at scale?

Extend Clean Recovery Across Sites and Clouds

Local snapshots protect against attack and error inside one system. VAST DataSpace extends that protection into a globally distributed namespace, so an immutable copy can live at another site or in the cloud, ready to serve if a whole location is lost. The mechanism is Global Access with synchronous and asynchronous replication plus Global Clones, so remote copies stay current without copying the full dataset back on every recovery.

Off-Site Immutable Copies

Asynchronous replication carries immutable snapshots to a second site or cloud region, so a clean copy survives the loss of an entire location, not just a device or node.

Recover Where You Need To

Global Access lets a surviving site serve data directly, so operations resume from the nearest healthy copy without a full restore across the wire first.

No Egress Double-Pay

Replicate and recover across clouds through one governed namespace instead of stitching vendor backup tools together, avoiding repeated egress charges on every failback.

Cyber Resilience Across Industries

Clean, Fast Recovery Where Downtime Costs the Most

The threat is universal, but the stakes differ by industry. Across regulated, high-volume, and mission-critical environments, teams use VAST DataStore to make recovery a minutes-long operation for their most critical data.