NIS2 Compliance: Why Your Storage & Backup Environment Matters More Than Ever

Europe’s new Network & Information Security Directive (NIS2) dramatically expands the cyber‑risk obligations of organizations that deliver “essential” or “important” services. The law raises maximum fines to €10 million or 2 % of global turnover for essential entities—whichever is higher – and explicitly lists “backup management and disaster‑recovery” among the mandatory controls.

Yet in many enterprises, storage and backup systems remain a major security blindspot. Default passwords linger, firmware goes unpatched, and storage management ports sit on the wrong network. Under NIS2 that technical debt is now a compliance risk as well as a security one. NIS2 places strong emphasis on the resilience of backup systems – not just having backups, but ensuring they are secure and tamper-resistant.

NIS2 In A Nutshell

Article 21 of the Directive outlines ten baseline cyber‑risk measures. Three of them relate to the security of storage & backup systems:

Bottom line: if your organization relies on those systems to keep data available, they are in scope.

The Overlooked Attack Surface

One of the core pillars of NIS2 is proactive vulnerability management – you can’t protect what you aren’t aware is vulnerable. This is especially pertinent to storage and backup platforms, which are rife with software and firmware components that can harbor vulnerabilities.

Storage and backup infrastructure is attractive to threat actors because:

• High privilege, high payoff – compromise one array controller and you own petabytes of business‑critical data.
• Specialist technology – mainstream vulnerability scanners often miss firmware CVEs and mis‑configs on storage devices.
• Assumed immunity – “it’s inside the firewall” is still a common—dangerous—mind‑set.
• Ransomware strategy – destroying backups first denies victims a safe restore path.

NIS2 flips the script: proving that your last line of defense is hardened is now a legal duty, not just good practice.

A Four‑Step Roadmap To NIS2 Compliance

Step 1: Discover & assess

Inventory every storage array, SAN switch, backup appliance and backup software. Compare firmware versions and configurations against vendor advisories and CIS hardening guides.

Step 2: Patch & harden

Detect and remediate vulnerabilities lurking in storage and backup systems that general vulnerability scanners often miss. Prioritize high‑severity vulnerabilities and security misconfigurations (e.g. exposed management interfaces, default credentials, lack of encryption) that could jeopardize both security and compliance.

Step 3: Build ransomware‑resilient backups

Adopt the 3‑2‑1 rule plus immutability:

• 3 copies of data
• on 2 different media
• with 1 copy offline/immutable

Document and test restore procedures at least quarterly.

Step 4: Monitor & prove

Continuous scanning and policy‑based reporting let you hand auditors a single dashboard that shows: compliant, deviations, remediation in progress.

Conclusion: Secure The Crown Jewels Before The Auditors Arrive

NIS2’s message is clear: data resilience is a board‑level responsibility. Storage and backup estates – which used to hide in the basement—are suddenly front‑and‑center. By following the four‑step roadmap and leveraging purpose‑built tools, you can turn an overlooked risk into a demonstrable strength.

Next actions:

• Schedule a Risk Assessment of your storage & backup systems
• Align findings with NIS2 Article 21 controls.
• Pilot an automated posture‑management platform to keep you compliant at scale.

How StorageGuard Helps To Guarantee NIS2 Compliance

StorageGuard helps enterprises build a compliant, risk-aware, and resilient security framework around one of their most valuable assets: storage & backup systems.

• StorageGuard enables organizations to define security policies and perform targeted risk analysis on storage and backup environments – areas that traditional compliance tools often overlook. With StorageGuard, enterprises can align their most critical data systems with the technical and operational expectations of NIS2.
• StorageGuard actively validates the configuration of backup systems, checking for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and weaknesses that could undermine their reliability during a crisis. By ensuring that backup systems align with best practices and internal security policies, StorageGuard directly supports NIS2’s goals for strengthened cyber resilience and the cyber hygiene baseline.
• StorageGuard checks whether systems are protected by multi-factor authentication (MFA), one-time passwords (OTP), and dual control mechanisms, which require multiple approvals for sensitive actions. These measures aren’t just security best practices – they are critical technical controls explicitly required under NIS2. one of their most valuable assets: data storage & backup systems.