You know how this story starts. A breach detonates. The security team locks down the network, scrambles to restore from backup, and works around the clock to piece together what happened. It’s chaos, but it’s controlled chaos—technical, tactical, and familiar. But while the CSO is firefighting, the CFO is walking into something far more destructive: the legal and financial storm that follows.

Let’s stop pretending that data is abstract. It’s not just “in the cloud” or “on the server.” It’s the backbone of your business. It’s how you invoice. How you track work. How you prove delivery. How you comply with contracts, regulations, and insurance policies. If you don’t know exactly where that data lives, how critical it is, or how fast it needs to come back online, you’re not doing incident response—you’re gambling.