CISOs are taking ownership of disaster recovery. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 50% of CISOs will own disaster recovery alongside incident response, a move from cybersecurity as prevention to cyber resilience as business continuity. 72% of organizations say cyber risk rose over the past year, according to the World Economic Forum. Boards now ask how fast the business recovers, why it failed and who owns the risk, instead of how many attacks were stopped. Yet recovery plans often fall apart once attackers disable identity systems or backups.
The line between IT risk and business risk has also disappeared, as AI systems now shape supply chains, financial controls and customer interactions. This guide explains why CISO disaster recovery ownership is coming and how to prepare for the bigger mandate.
Why CISO Disaster Recovery Ownership Is Inevitable
CISO disaster recovery ownership makes sense because most business disruption now starts with a cyberattack. Ransomware, supply chain attacks and AI-enabled fraud cause outages that traditional disaster recovery teams were never built for. Recovery planning therefore has to assume an adversary, since plans that ignore identity compromise and backup corruption fail against real attacks.
CISOs also understand both the threat and the technical infrastructure that recovery depends on. Gartner notes that cybersecurity programs are rebranding as cyber resilience programs. Separating incident response from DR creates handoff gaps, and critical time is lost when separate teams have to coordinate the move from containment to recovery under pressure.
Many attacks start with credential abuse or a compromised supplier. When attackers disable identity systems or corrupt backups, recovery plans built without attack scenarios fail badly. CISOs who own both functions can design one set of playbooks for adversarial scenarios, while traditional DR assumed accidental failures.
CISOs are now defining the minimum viable company: the critical processes that must keep running during and after an attack. That moves disaster recovery from restoring every system to recovering the most important business processes first. The hard part is linking IT protection to business continuity, so that business owners understand the IT dependencies in their continuity plans and know how to act during an incident.
What Changes When the CISO Owns Disaster Recovery
When the CISO owns disaster recovery, business continuity shifts from restoring infrastructure to resilience that expects an attacker. That changes recovery planning and team structure. It also needs skills most security teams lack today, such as business impact analysis, service dependency mapping and recovery orchestration across hybrid environments. Security engineers have to learn business continuity, and DR specialists have to learn attacker tactics. Combined teams work better because they drop the assumptions that make both programs fail under real attacks.
The Shift to Cyber Resilience
The wider shift from cybersecurity to cyber resilience explains why CISO disaster recovery ownership is a natural step, not scope creep. Prevention alone is no longer enough in 2026, because the attack surface grows faster than traditional security can adapt. Organizations have to assume breaches will happen and plan recovery around that, and boards now see cyber risk as a direct threat to revenue.
| Dimension | Traditional Cybersecurity | Cyber Resilience Model |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Goal | Prevent all breaches from occurring | ✓ Ensure business continues during and after incidents |
| DR Ownership | Separate IT operations or facilities team | ✓ CISO owns unified incident-to-recovery lifecycle |
| Recovery Testing | Annual tabletop exercises with benign scenarios | ✓ Regular adversarial testing with identity compromise |
| Board Reporting | Threat metrics and patch compliance | ◐ Recovery speed, outage cost, and resilience posture |
| Success Metric | Attacks prevented and vulnerabilities patched | ✓ Business continuity maintained under real attack |
Gartner’s Maverick Research warns that CISOs must change their role or become obsolete, widening their scope to support profit centers, with AI governance, business continuity and revenue activities as priorities. CISOs are also getting more direct access to executives, because boards see that AI risk cannot sit with an isolated team. The CISO who owns security and recovery becomes a chief resilience officer in practice, even without the title.
Adding disaster recovery to the CISO’s job without more resources risks making the burnout among security leaders worse. CISOs should lead through influence instead of taking on every task themselves, and the mandate has to come with budget, headcount and authority to match. Without them, the bigger scope becomes one more burden that drives experienced CISOs out of the role.
Preparing for the New Mandate
CISOs preparing to own disaster recovery need to build skills in four areas at once, turning recovery from an IT infrastructure task into a security-informed business function that boards can measure and trust. Start before ownership formally moves, because cleanroom environments, staff training and adversarial playbooks take months and cannot be squeezed into the weeks after the mandate changes.
Five CISO Disaster Recovery Priorities for 2026
Based on the Gartner prediction, here are five CISO disaster recovery priorities:
- Assess your current DR program for adversarial readiness: Traditional DR assumes accidental failures, so check whether your plans cover identity compromise, backup corruption and supply chain disruption. That shows the gaps real attacks exploit during recovery.
- Build cleanroom recovery environments now: Attackers routinely target backups, so create isolated recovery environments that cannot be reached from the production network. Recovery then starts from a trusted foundation.
- Define minimum viable company processes with business leaders: With 50% of CISOs owning DR by 2028, map the critical business processes that must continue during disruption. Recovery order then follows business value instead of the IT hierarchy.
- Integrate incident response and DR into unified playbooks: Handoffs between separate teams cost recovery time, so merge incident response and disaster recovery into one workflow. Containment then flows straight into recovery.
- Negotiate budget and authority alongside the expanded mandate: Disaster recovery needs real infrastructure and staff, so make sure the new responsibility comes with matching resources. Agree who makes recovery decisions in a crisis before the crisis starts.
The Short Version
Key Takeaway Gartner expects 50% of CISOs to own disaster recovery by 2028 as cybersecurity turns into cyber resilience. 72% of organizations report rising cyber risk, and 30% of breaches now involve third parties. Boards care about recovery speed more than attacks stopped, and recovery plans fail when identity and backups are compromised. CISOs need attack-aware recovery with cleanroom environments, minimum viable company priorities and unified incident-to-recovery playbooks, backed by enough resources to avoid burnout.
Looking Ahead: The Chief Resilience Officer
CISO disaster recovery ownership may grow into a formal chief resilience officer role at many organizations by 2030, covering security operations, incident response, disaster recovery, business continuity and operational resilience, and reporting to the CEO or the board’s risk committee. AI-driven resilience platforms are also likely to automate recovery orchestration, adjusting the recovery order to the attack pattern seen during containment. Coordinating across cloud providers, on-premises systems and third parties, they could cut recovery from hours or days to minutes and catch dependencies people miss under the stress of a live incident.
CISOs who accept a bigger scope without more authority and resources will burn out faster than those who negotiate properly. Those who build cyber resilience programs with board support, proper funding and clear decision rights will shape the next era of security leadership. Disaster recovery ownership positions security as the business continuity function modern enterprises need. CISOs who prepare now will be ready when the mandate arrives, and the preparation pays for itself in the first major incident that tests backup integrity, identity availability and process dependencies under real attack.
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References
- 50% CISOs Own DR by 2028, Cyber Resilience Rebrand: Bitsight — Gartner Predicts 2026: Prioritizing Cyber Resilience
- 72% Increased Risk, AI-Driven Resilience, CISO as CRO: Fortinet — The Year of Resilience: What 2026 Demands from CISOs
- Minimum Viable Company, Recovery Testing, Board Expectations: Lexology — Cybersecurity Predictions for 2026: CISO Focus Areas
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