When Malware Strikes: How to Build Resilience with Azure-Based Disaster Recovery
Imagine walking into the office on a Monday morning to find your systems locked by ransomware. Productivity halts. Emails don’t send. Customer data is inaccessible. What would you do?
Ransomware attacks like this are no longer rare, with small and mid-sized businesses increasingly in the crosshairs. These digital disasters can be just as disruptive as fires or floods and the difference between recovery and ruin often comes down to preparation.
In this article, we’ll explore how to build a business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan that not only keeps your business online but helps you bounce back quickly from ransomware and other threats. And we’ll show how Microsoft Azure can give you enterprise-grade protection - without the cost and complexity of building a second data centre.
The shift from traditional disasters to cyber resilience
BC/DR has traditionally focused on natural events - power outages, hardware failure or weather-related disruptions. But today, malware is just as likely to bring business operations to a standstill. Ransomware attacks now target not only your production systems but your backups too, encrypting or deleting them to increase pressure and maximize payout.
Microsoft’s own security experts put it, “It's important to prepare for the worst and establish frameworks to contain and prevent attackers' ability to get what they're after.”
Organizations need to think about cyberattacks not just as a security problem, but as a business continuity issue. A solid BC/DR strategy ensures your team knows what to do and that your systems and data are recoverable, when malware strikes.
1. Backups that can’t be tampered with
- Use offsite or cloud-based backups that are immutable, meaning they can’t be altered or deleted, even by internal users.
- Azure Backup offers secure storage with multifactor authentication, soft delete and retention policies that protect against both accidental and malicious deletion.
2. A failover plan for when systems go down
- Have a tested plan to quickly shift operations to a backup environment.
- Azure Site Recovery (ASR) replicates your on-premises environment to the cloud so you can spin up infrastructure in Azure within minutes, not days.
3. People and process
- Conduct tabletop exercises and failover drills.
- Train staff to recognize social engineering attacks – the entry point for most malware.
- Document your recovery steps so everyone knows what to do in a real-world incident.
Why Azure is a smart DR site, even If you’re fully on-premises
Traditionally, BC/DR meant investing in a secondary site; buying duplicate servers, renting colocation space and hoping you’d never need to use it. With Azure, that paradigm shifts:
Benefit | Traditional DR | Azure-Based DR |
Cost | High upfront CAPEX | Pay-as-you-go |
Scalability | Fixed resources | Elastic cloud scale |
Maintenance | Manual patching/hardware | Managed by Microsoft |
Availability | Single region | Global Azure regions |
Speed | Hours/days | Minutes with ASR |
With Azure, you only pay for what you need when you need it, keeping costs low and agility high.
How Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup work together
Think of it this way: Azure Site Recovery gets you back online and Azure Backup ensures you have clean data to restore.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR)
- Replicates your virtual or physical servers to Azure.
- Supports automated failover/failback.
- Works across VMware, Hyper-V and physical workloads.
Azure Backup
- Secure, air-gapped backups stored in Azure Recovery Services Vault.
- Retains point-in-time snapshots for recovery before the attack occurred.
- Built-in encryption, identity protection and deletion lock.
Together, they give you a resilient, hybrid-ready disaster recovery strategy that’s simple to test, easy to manage and cost-effective.
Best practices for ransomware resilience
Document your plan
Clearly define what to do in a ransomware attack, including who triggers failover, how to communicate and how to restore operations.
Test frequently
Use Azure’s non-disruptive test failover capabilities to simulate disaster without impacting production.
Protect backups with policy
Implement Azure Immutable Vaults or retention locks to prevent backup tampering.
Monitor and secure
Use tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud to monitor for threats and enforce best practices across hybrid environments.
Start small, scale smart
Begin with your most critical systems. Azure makes it easy to scale up protection as your needs grow.
Why partner with CDW for BC/DR success
Cyberattacks aren’t a matter of if – they’re a matter of when. But with a solid BC/DR strategy powered by Azure, you can turn even the worst-case scenario into a fast recovery story.
At CDW, we’ve helped organizations of all sizes implement cloud-first continuity strategies using Microsoft technologies. Whether you’re just starting to assess your risks or looking to upgrade a legacy DR solution, our team can help you design, deploy and optimize a plan that fits your business goals.
With deep Azure expertise and a track record of delivering resilient IT outcomes, we ensure that business continuity isn’t an afterthought, it’s built in.