Doron Youngerwood

Gartner Calls for Storage & Backup Hardening to Combat Ransomware

  • July 21, 2025
  • 3 min read

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When we talk about cybersecurity, storage and backup systems rarely get the spotlight. But in today’s evolving threat landscape, ignoring them can be catastrophic. Recent cyberattacks have shown that these foundational components — once seen as technical backend concerns — are now front-line targets.

Gartner recently emphasized the need for much stricter security in its new report, Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2025. Gartner analyst Julia Palmer focused on emerging storage technologies on infrastructure outcomes, as well as their adoption rates and maturity levels.

The goal was to help Storage & Infrastructure Leaders develop strategies to deliver secure, innovative and future-proof storage platforms that meet business requirements.

One of the key technologies highlighted in the report was ‘Cyberstorage’, which in Gartner’s words: “actively defends storage systems and data against cyberattacks through prevention, early detection and attack blocking.”

From ransomware to insider threats, if your primary storage is compromised, hundreds or thousands of workloads — databases, containers, VMs — can go down in a flash.

Worse still, if your backup systems are compromised, there’s no Plan B. No way to recover. You’re out of options.

On average, each enterprise storage or backup device has 10 vulnerabilities, including 5 critical or high-severity ones. Yet many organizations have limited visibility into these weaknesses.

While traditional security solutions exist at the network perimeter, storage systems often fall short in safeguarding against malicious activities. Cyberstorage solutions offer robust active defense against, and recovery from, cyberattacks targeting data storage systems – and their data.

Gartner Recommendations:

  • Prioritize active defense and security of unstructured and structured data storage systems, because identifying and blocking an attack is just as important as recovering from one
  • Avoid relying solely on data backups and snapshot methods to address cyber resilience concerns. These should serve as a last resort for disaster recovery rather than a proactive defense for your data.
  • Select storage vendors based on their ability to support all the pillars of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (i.e., Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover)
  • Upgrade existing storage infrastructure with vendor offerings and SLAs that include cyberstorage capabilities. Also, investigate the cyberstorage capabilities of your existing vendors, as many of them are adding cyberstorage services alongside their storage services

Solving the Cyberstorage Shortfall

StorageGuard is the industry’s first dedicated security hardening and vulnerability management platform purpose-built for enterprise storage and backup environments.

It scans, detects, and prioritizes vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps across multi-vendor storage and backup systems, enabling organizations to proactively secure their critical data infrastructure.

StorageGuard also performs secure configuration analysis, allowing organizations to assess their storage and backup environments against security best practices, review baseline configuration findings, and implement hardening measures to reduce the risk of future attacks.

Final Thoughts

Storage and backup systems are your organization’s most critical — and ironically most overlooked — assets. They deserve the same security rigor as endpoints, networks, and apps.

With attacks intensifying and standards evolving, now is the time to prioritize vulnerability management and configuration hardening for your storage and backup infrastructure.

Read the full report:

Hype Cycle for Storage Technologies, 2025 (For Gartner Subscribers only). 

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