Plan CyberArk vault storage with confidence: session recording size matters

Outline (skeleton for flow)

• Hook: A quick, relatable scenario about planning vault storage and the surprise guest star: session recordings.

• Why vault storage deserves attention: it’s the backbone of performance, compliance, and recovery.

• What session recordings are: what they capture, why they matter, and how they eat storage.

• The core idea: why the size of session recordings often drives vault storage planning.

• How to estimate storage needs: practical steps, simple math, and a mini example.

• Retention and lifecycle: keeping data long enough for audits, trimming what isn’t needed.

• Other storage considerations: data types, third-party integrations, and performance trade-offs.

• Practical steps to implement: inventory, baseline, monitor, and iterate.

• Close with a takeaway that ties back to the main point and encourages a proactive stance.

Article: Vault storage planning in CyberArk—why the size of session recordings matters

If you’ve ever tried to plan a storage budget for a growing toolset, you know the drill: you map out users, you estimate peak loads, you pencil in a little headroom. Then reality hits, and suddenly you’re staring at a storage bill that looks like a small mortgage. In the world of CyberArk, one factor tends to dominate the vault storage conversation more than others: the size of session recordings. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t feel flashy, but it can quietly decide whether your vault runs smoothly or groans under pressure during audits and peak hours.

Let me explain why this matters without turning you into a spreadsheet hermit. The vault isn’t just a passive keeper of passwords and keys. It’s the central nervous system for privileged access. When people connect to protected assets, CyberArk can capture session data—who connected, what commands were run, when the session started and ended, and sometimes even the screen actions. That data, while invaluable for security and compliance, takes up space. And if you don’t plan for it, you’ll find yourself re-allocating resources or trimming data sooner than you’d like. That’s not a great place to be when you’re trying to maintain audit trails or investigate incidents.

What exactly are session recordings, and why do they matter for storage?

Think of session recordings as a detailed webcam for privileged activity. They record the lifecycle of a session: the user, the target, the duration, the commands issued, and the outcomes. In many environments, these recordings serve multiple purposes:

• Compliance and auditing: auditors want to verify who did what, when, and for how long.

• Incident response: if something unusual happens, you can replay the session to understand the sequence of actions.

• Forensics and governance: a historical record helps with governance reviews and policy enforcement.

Because of this, session recordings tend to accumulate quickly. If you’re not careful, a handful of long privileged sessions can inflate the vault’s storage consumption, impacting performance, backups, and restore times. So, yes—the size of session recordings is a central variable in storage planning. It’s not that other factors aren’t important (the number of users, the type of data, and integrations all matter), but session recordings often drive the storage envelope more than the rest.

Estimating storage needs without turning it into a nightmare

Here’s a practical approach you can actually use without drowning in numbers:

• Start with a baseline. Look at your current environment: how many privileged sessions are typical in a day? How long do they last on average? What’s the typical data footprint per session?

• Measure the ongoing rate. If you can, monitor for a couple of weeks to capture peak days, like month-ends or release cycles, when activity tends to spike.

• Factor in retention. How long do you need to keep recordings for compliance or audit purposes? Some regulations require specific retention windows; others are driven by internal governance needs.

• Consider compression and data granularity. Depending on your CyberArk configuration, you may store high-fidelity recordings or lighter logs. Each choice changes the size a lot.

• Build a rough calculation. A simple way is: daily storage load = (average session size) × (number of sessions per day) × (retention period in days, if you keep a rolling window). Then add a fudge factor for growth and peak periods.

To make this concrete, imagine you’re observing 150 privileged sessions per day, with an average recording size of 20 MB per session, and you only need 30 days of retention. That’s 150 × 20 MB × 30 = 90,000 MB, or roughly 90 GB of storage for session recordings. If you expect growth or occasional longer sessions, you’d add a safety margin—say 20–30%—to land somewhere in the 110–120 GB range. This is the kind of straightforward estimate that helps you size the vault without overbuilding.

Retention policies and lifecycle management: the art of trimming without losing value

Storage planning isn’t only about adding more space. It’s about keeping what you need and pruning what you don’t. A thoughtful retention policy can save a lot of space while preserving the usefulness of the data for audits and investigations. Here are a few ideas:

• Tiered storage. Keep recent recordings on faster storage for quick access and long-term ones on cheaper, slower storage. It’s a practical way to balance cost and performance.

• Archiving rules. Move older recordings to an archive tier automatically, with an easy restore path if you need them for a compliance review.

• Purge policies. Set clear rules for when recordings can be deleted, aligned with regulatory requirements and business needs. Don’t be afraid to reassess these policies as your environment evolves.

• Separate data streams. If you can, separate the raw session data from metadata (timestamps, user IDs, session IDs). Metadata often takes much less space but remains crucial for searching and reporting.

Other storage considerations that matter, but usually don’t loom as large

While the size of session recordings is the big lever, other aspects deserve a quick nod:

• Type of data stored. If recordings capture rich media or high-detail logs, they’ll consume more space than lean text-based records. The trade-off is between depth of insight and storage footprint.

• Integration with third-party systems. If you’re pulling in data from SIEMs, ticketing systems, or cloud logs, you’ll need to coordinate retention and lifecycle across different repositories. This often affects overall planning and cost.

• Performance and backups. The vault isn’t only about volume; it’s about how fast you can access old recordings and how efficiently you can back them up. Plan with your disaster recovery objectives in mind.

Putting the plan into practice: a few steps you can start today

• Inventory your environment. List the Safe Targets, privileged accounts, and typical session patterns. A clean inventory gives you a solid starting point.

• Define a retention ladder. Decide how long you’ll keep recordings in the hot tier and when they should move to archive. Make sure this aligns with audits and regulatory needs.

• Run a pilot. Test with a subset of data and a controlled retention policy to observe impact on storage, performance, and recovery.

• Set up ongoing monitoring. Use dashboards to track storage growth, session counts, and retention hit rates. The goal is to catch overuse before it becomes a problem, not after.

• Revisit periodically. As your environment changes—more users, bigger workloads, new compliance rules—revisit the numbers. It’s not a one-and-done job; it’s a living plan.

A human note: why this matters beyond crunching numbers

storage planning isn’t a dry checkbox. It’s about keeping your security posture robust without sacrificing usability or compliance. When you plan around session recordings, you’re also setting a rhythm for governance. You’re saying, “We value visibility and accountability,” while making sure the system isn’t so cramped that it slows down legitimate work or makes audits a headache.

And yes, the size of session recordings often remains the dominant factor driving vault storage decisions. That doesn’t mean you ignore the other pieces—the number of users, the kinds of data you store, and how you integrate with other systems all influence total cost and performance. But in practice, those session logs tend to fill the vault faster than you might expect, especially as organizations scale their privileged access programs.

The bottom line

If you’re building or refreshing a CyberArk vault, start with the question: how big could session recordings get? Estimate, plan, and test around that core, and you’ll head off storage woes before they derail performance or compliance. It’s a practical, grounded approach that respects both the science of data management and the art of staying agile in a fast-moving security landscape.

If you’d like, we can walk through a tailor-made outline for your environment—mapping your user patterns, retention needs, and growth projections to a concrete storage plan. After all, a little foresight now saves you from scrambling later. And who doesn’t want that peace of mind when safeguarding critical privileges?