Cyberstorage Comes of Age: Why Security Posture Management Is Now Critical for Storage & Backup

Enterprise cyber resilience strategies are undergoing a fundamental shift. Storage is no longer a passive repository for data and backups – it is becoming an active control point in cyber defense. This shift is being driven by real‑world demand from enterprise buyers.

In fact, Gartner reports a 187% year‑over‑year increase in client inquiries related to data resiliency in 2025 compared with 2024, underscoring how urgently organizations are rethinking their ability to protect and recover business‑critical data.

In parallel, inquiries explicitly focused on cyberstorage grew by 167% over the same period, highlighting the acceleration of storage‑layer security as a standalone priority – not just an extension of backup or recovery tools.

From Backup-Centric Recovery to Active Storage Defense

Traditional cyber resilience approaches focused heavily on backup frequency, immutable snapshots, and recovery time objectives. While these capabilities remain essential, they are no longer sufficient on their own.

Modern ransomware and data‑centric attacks are designed to evade detection, compromise administrative credentials, and directly target storage & backup systems

The Market Guide for Cyberstorage describes how cyberstorage embeds security directly into storage and backup platforms, focusing on posture hardening, continuous validation, and recovery assurance.

Put simply: backup is reactive by nature; storage must now participate proactively in cyber defense.

Why Storage & Backup Security Posture Management Matters

As cyberstorage capabilities mature, Gartner emphasizes that consistent execution and hardened security posture across different storage and backup platforms are far more important than individual features, especially in large enterprises operating multivendor storage and backup ecosystems and legacy infrastructure alongside newer platforms.

In practice, this complexity leads to uneven protection. Native security features may exist on some platforms but not others. Policies drift over time. Privileged access expands quietly. Recovery assumptions go untested.

Storage and backup security posture management addresses these realities by continuously assessing and validating:

• Configuration baselines across storage and backup platforms – and deviations or drifts that happen over time
• Exposure to security advisories, vulnerabilities, and security misconfigurations
• Alignment with industry standards, regulation, and cybersecurity frameworks

Without posture management, organizations often discover gaps only during an incident – when it is already too late.

Cyberstorage in Multivendor, Legacy, and Hybrid Environments

A key insight from the Market Guide is that, while many storage vendors are embedding baseline cyberstorage features, capability depth and maturity remain uneven – particularly across:

• Multivendor environments
• Older or legacy storage platforms
• Complex hybrid cloud architectures

As a result, many enterprises continue to adopt specialized cyberstorage solutions to provide independent validation, consistent policy enforcement, and unified visibility across their entire storage and backup estate.

These solutions are especially important in environments where organizations must assume that administrative credentials may be compromised – and where recovery workflows must remain trusted and operable under active attack conditions.

StorageGuard by Core6: A Representative Vendor in Cyberstorage

In the Gartner Market Guide for Cyberstorage, Core6 (previously ‘Continuity’)  is named as a Representative Vendor based on our StorageGuard solution, reflecting its role in addressing the growing need for security posture management.

StorageGuard focuses on continuously assessing and hardening storage and backup environments, helping organizations uncover misconfigurations, security gaps, and latent risks across diverse platforms. By delivering cross‑vendor visibility and posture enforcement, StorageGuard supports the core cyberstorage outcomes highlighted in the Market Guide.

This posture‑driven approach is particularly valuable for large enterprises, where operational complexity – not lack of technology – is often the biggest obstacle to cyber resilience.

Download the Gartner® Market Guide for Cyberstorage

Attribution: Gartner, Market Guide for Cyberstorage, Vishesh Divya, 23 February 2026.

Disclaimer: GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. What is cyberstorage?

Cyberstorage is an approach to securing enterprise storage that embeds active detection, containment, and recovery assurance directly at the data layer, rather than relying solely on backup or perimeter security. It treats storage systems as active participants in cyber defense, capable of detecting early-stage attacks, limiting blast radius, and validating recovery readiness.

2. What is security posture management for storage and backup?

Storage and backup security posture management is the continuous assessment and hardening of storage and backup environments to ensure they are securely configured, resilient to attack, and aligned with cyber resilience best practices. It focuses on identifying misconfigurations, privilege risks, policy gaps, and exposure that could undermine recovery during a cyber incident.

3. Why are multivendor storage environments harder to secure?

Multivendor environments often have inconsistent security models, visibility gaps, and uneven maturity across platforms. Native protection features vary widely between vendors, making it difficult to maintain a unified security posture. This complexity increases the risk of misconfiguration and blind spots that attackers can exploit.

4. What types of organizations benefit most from cyberstorage – and specifically security posture management?

Cyberstorage and storage security posture management are especially valuable for:

• Large enterprises
• Organizations with multivendor or hybrid storage environments
• Regulated industries with strict recovery and compliance requirements
• Businesses reliant on uninterrupted access to critical data