4 Questions CISOs Should Ask Their Storage Team Before the Next Breach

Data storage doesn’t usually make it to the top of a CISO’s priority list. When you’re juggling identity, access, detection, and governance, the infrastructure in the background doesn’t exactly demand attention. Until it does. When a cyber threat hits or a backup fails at the worst possible time, storage has a way of stealing the spotlight.

The truth is, resilience isn’t just about how often you back up. It’s about how well your data is protected and how quickly you can bring it back online when things go sideways. In that sense, your storage target is every bit as important as your firewalls, endpoints, or access controls.

If your storage isn’t built for immutability, accessibility, and affordable testing, you’re carrying more risk than you think. Now’s a good time to step back and look at how storage fits into your overall resilience plan. Ask your team these questions to reveal whether your organization could effectively recover when it matters most.

1. Does our storage actually reduce business risk?

Backups are easy to celebrate. They check boxes, satisfy auditors, and create a sense of comfort. But comfort isn’t the same as resilience. The real test is where those backups land, how they’re protected, and how reliably they can be recovered when the pressure is on.

Think about your storage target as the foundation of your recovery strategy. It’s the destination for every backup, and if it isn’t resilient, neither is your data protection plan. True cyber-resilient storage combines durability with safeguards that keep attackers, insiders, and even operational costs from getting in the way of a clean restore.

Start by confirming that your backup data lives in secondary storage that’s isolated from primary production systems. Then dig into the architecture itself. Is the data immutable, meaning it can’t be modified or deleted until its retention period expires? Is encryption applied both in transit and at rest, using current standards like AES-256? Is MFA turned on to securely manage access to your account? Do you have a feature like multi-user authentication (MUA) in place so no single credential can delete buckets or accounts on its own?

These controls make the difference between a fast, verifiable recovery and a costly, uncertain one. The 3-2-1-1-0 framework remains the gold standard here: three copies of your data on two types of media, with one offsite and one immutable, and zero errors verified after recovery.

If your storage doesn’t support those principles, you’re not just risking downtime. You’re betting your resilience strategy on hope. And hope is not a strategy.

2. Are we building resilience that’s testable, not theoretical? 

Not all storage is built for resilience, and that’s where risk creeps in. Most environments can back up data without issue; it’s the “getting it back” part that’s far more complicated. A few critical features determine whether recovery is routine or a race against the clock.

Start with the foundation: cloud object storage. It’s designed for durability, scalability, and redundancy across regions, ensuring a single outage can’t take everything down with it. It’s the backbone that keeps operations steady when disruption hits.

From there, make sure the essentials are in place:

• Immutability. Once data is written, it should stay that way until its retention period ends. That safeguard keeps your clean copies out of reach from ransomware or accidental deletion.

• Encryption everywhere. Data should be encrypted in transit and at rest using strong, current standards like AES-256. Don’t forget to rotate the keys regularly; it’s the simplest way to limit exposure.

• Zero Trust access. Storage should follow the same principles as the rest of your environment: no implicit trust, and no single person with the power to delete everything. Multi-user authentication enforces this by requiring more than one approval for potentially destructive actions.

• Affordable recovery testing. If API calls and egress fees make testing expensive, it won’t happen often enough. Recovery only works when it’s practiced regularly and without hesitation, and those tests reveal more than speed. They confirm two fundamentals: that you’re backing up what you think you are, and that what you’re backing up is what you’d need to recover in a real incident.

Each of these controls protects a different link in the recovery chain. Together they make sure your data stays intact, accessible, and recoverable, the three outcomes every resilient organization should be able to count on.

3. Can we recover without breaking the budget or SLAs?

Even the best defenses assume failure at some point. When that happens, recovery speed determines whether the business experiences a minor disruption or a major outage. A well-documented recovery plan is only as strong as your ability to execute on it, not to mention test it often enough to trust the results.

Start by asking how your storage and backup systems handle failover. Can the team restore critical applications quickly, or do recovery times depend on which cloud tier your data happens to live in? Be honest about cost structure: cold storage looks cheap on paper until your first large-scale recovery proves otherwise. Those savings disappear fast when you’re hit with egress fees or stuck waiting hours to retrieve data during an incident.

Ask what service-level agreements your storage provider guarantees for access and recovery times, and whether those metrics align with your internal RTO (recovery time objective) goals. RTO is all about speed, or how quickly systems and data can be brought back online after an incident. That speed determines how long operations stay down, how much trust or revenue might be lost, and how fast you can prove the situation is under control.

Then consider your RPOs (recovery point objectives). Here the focus shifts to data, or more specifically, how far back you can recover since the last backup. This depends entirely on how often those backups occur. The more economical and predictable your storage costs, the more frequently you can back up, shrinking that window of potential loss. If costs force you to stretch out the interval between backups, every extra hour increases your exposure to risk.

Finally, look at your testing cadence and cost. Recovery drills should happen at least quarterly, more often for systems that are business-critical or frequently updated. If your storage provider charges egress or API fees every time you validate a restore, testing will fall off the schedule. When testing stops, so does confidence.

A plan that’s too expensive to test or too slow to execute is just a document. Regular, affordable testing is how you validate every other aspect of your cyber-resilience strategy.

4. Are we confident our storage meets compliance and audit requirements?

Compliance isn’t just a formality. It’s the accountability layer that proves your controls work. Storage plays a bigger role in that story than most people realize.

Review which regulations and internal policies apply to your organization. Frameworks like HIPAA, FERPA, GDPR, SOX, or sector-specific standards such as PCI DSS, CJIS, or FedRAMP often overlap around data retention, privacy, and security. That overlap means every storage decision, from where data lives to how it’s encrypted and accessed, has compliance implications.

New EU regulations are adding another layer of scrutiny. The Cyber Resilience Act and the EU Data Act introduce fresh obligations around cybersecurity, data governance, and transparency. They reflect a broader global shift, not just raising the bar for how organizations store and protect their data, but how they demonstrate resilience and trust.

Your storage architecture should support those mandates with features that make compliance practical. Confirm these compliance requirements with your storage team:

• Retention and immutability. Can you prove that regulated data is stored for the full retention period and that it can’t be altered or deleted before then? Immutability and versioning provide the assurance auditors expect.

• Encryption and key management. Is sensitive data encrypted in transit and at rest using strong, current standards like AES-256? Are keys rotated regularly and managed through a dedicated key management service (KMS), separate from storage credentials?

• Zero Trust principles. Does your storage environment enforce least privilege, continuous verification, and separation of duties for administrative actions? Features like MUA help close the insider-risk gap.

• Audit readiness and visibility. How quickly can your team produce evidence of data access, retention, or recovery for an audit? Do logs and metadata provide the tamper-evident trail regulators expect?

If any of these answers are uncertain, it’s time to dig deeper. Storage that supports encryption, immutability, dedicated key management, and transparent audit logging doesn’t just fulfill regulatory requirements. It strengthens confidence across your entire security and compliance posture.

Bringing it all together

No organization gets resilience right by accident. It’s a product of intent: how well your teams plan, test, and adapt when things inevitably go wrong.

Storage isn’t the most visible piece of that puzzle, but it’s often the one that decides how quickly the rest can recover. The questions you ask today about immutability, access, testing, and compliance set the tone for how prepared you’ll be tomorrow.

If these questions raised any uncertainty, you know where to start. Resilience isn’t built on intent; it’s built in verification. Every tested restore is a statement of confidence that your organization can keep running, even when the worst happens.