Key takeaways
- Cyberstorage adds detection, access control, and recovery to storage itself.
- Gartner named the category in 2021; RackTop shipped the first inline Active Defense in 2020.
- It protects live production data, not only copied backup data.
Cyberstorage is a storage architecture that builds security controls, behavioral detection, access governance, and cyber recovery into the storage layer itself. Instead of treating storage as a passive container and bolting security on elsewhere, Cyberstorage makes the system that serves the data an active participant in defending it.
Gartner introduced the term in 2021 and named RackTop as a sample vendor. RackTop had shipped the first inline, storage-layer Active Defense the year before, in October 2020 — which is why the company describes itself as having created the category rather than entered it.
How it differs from backup and traditional NAS
Traditional NAS optimizes for capacity, performance, and uptime. It will faithfully serve a ransomware process encrypting a share, because serving file operations is its job and it has no way to judge intent. Backup, meanwhile, protects a copy of data after the fact. Both are necessary. Neither detects or stops an attack on live production data as it happens.
Cyberstorage fills that gap. It inspects file operations inline, enforces attribute-based access policy on every request, keeps immutable recovery points, and can roll back exactly the files an attack touched.