What Are Immutable Backups? (And Why They Matter for Enterprises)
An immutable backup is a copy of your data that cannot be altered, encrypted, or deleted once it is written—not by an administrator, not by ransomware, not even by the attacker who has stolen your domain admin credentials. Immutability is enforced with WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) technology, which locks each recovery point for a defined retention period. During that window the data is effectively frozen: it can be read and restored, but it cannot be changed.
This matters because backups have become the primary target of modern ransomware. For decades, the standard advice was simple—"keep good backups and you can always recover." Attackers learned that lesson too. Today's ransomware actively hunts for backup servers, deletes snapshots, and corrupts repositories before triggering encryption, precisely so victims have no choice but to pay. An ordinary backup that an attacker can reach and erase is no backup at all.
U.S. federal agencies—including CISA, the NSA, and the FBI—now describe immutable, offline backups as the "last line of defense" against ransomware. For enterprises in Latin America and the United States, immutability has shifted from a nice-to-have to a baseline control. It is increasingly written into cyber-insurance underwriting requirements and regulatory expectations. A resilient cloud backup and data protection strategy built on immutable storage is now what separates a recoverable incident from a business-ending one.
