AI Raises the Stakes for Cyber Resilience
An organization’s ability to quickly recover from a business disruption will be a competitive advantage in an era of AI-driven threats and business enablement.
Commvault SHIFT — Nashville, Tenn. — Enterprise data recovery practices must evolve from a last-resort response to a continuous operational discipline focused on minimizing business disruption and containing the blast radius of cyber incidents as quickly as possible.
That was the central message at Commvault’s SHIFT 2026 conference this week, where security executives highlighted the growing importance of making operational resilience a business priority as AI-driven threats and increasingly autonomous business processes complicate the task of maintaining continuity.
Resilience Is the New Competitive Advantage
“AI is changing the durable advantage you have built for your business, your brand, your supply chain, your data,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, president and CEO of Commvault, in a keynote address at the event. “In the AI era, resilience will be your new competitive advantage.”
Two developments are driving trend. On the threat side, AI is giving attackers the ability to automate and accelerate reconnaissance, exploit development, social engineering, and lateral movement. The trend has compressed the time organizations have to detect and contain an intrusion, Mirchandani and other executives at the event noted.
At the same time, enterprises are increasingly embedding AI into business processes, workflows and decision-making, creating new dependencies on data, applications and autonomous systems.
The result is a more complex operating environment in which a disruption can have wider and faster consequences, making the ability to contain incidents, preserve trusted operations and recover without derailing business activity more important than ever.
Attackers these days are able move faster with a level of automation not available before, noted Rajeev Kottomtharayil, chief products officer at Commvault. Increasingly, recovery is becoming not just about speed but bringing back clean data. “If everything is under attack, how do we know what to trust? The real goal is to have a clean safe space to recover even if everything around you has been compromised,” Kottomtharayil said.
The Ability to Fail Safely
Business innovation and enablement are also driving the need for greater operational resilience. Resilient operations give organizations the confidence to experiment with AI and put it to work across the business, while ensuring they can recover quickly when something goes wrong, said Pragnesh Dave, head of generative AI and ML sales at AWS. “AI is collapsing the amount of time it takes to move from an idea to an outcome,” he said during a keynote session. As a result, the competitive advantage will come not simply from how quickly organizations can turn intelligence into action, but from how quickly they can do so while managing the risks and consequences when those actions sometimes prove wrong.
Dave pointed to the operations model at Amazon that emphasizes the notion of the “door swinging both ways,” when teams try to innovate. It is an approach that has enabled teams at Amazon to code more than four times faster than before, he said.
“The question for everyone is not if something is going to break,” he said. Rather it is about what the blast radius is and the time it takes from when something breaks to recovering to the prior trusted state. “If something goes wrong you need to be able to recover quickly. You should be able to walk back a decision. Think of your recovery time as your innovation project.”
A Baseline Requirement: Continuous Technologies
Continuous detection and continuous recovery are going to become a baseline requirement for organizations, argued Peter Diamandis, futurist, entrepreneur, and founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation. Over the next few years, he foresees all organizations harness AI to migrate a significant workload to the “digital edge” with humans providing judgement, taste, and oversight. “AI gives us all access to capabilities that were once scare.” The qualities that matter the most will be the speed at which an organization can innovate and that requires standing up capabilities to recover quickly when failures do occur, he said during a keynote address.
At the same time, recovery is not becoming a substitute for prevention, says Bill O’Connell, chief security officer at Commvault. Both are equally important. But “building the highest walls and the deepest moat” to keep threats out alone, is no longer enough. Organizations have to equally focus on building an ability to recover quickly to a trusted state regardless of the reason for a disruption and to thoroughly test that ability before it becomes necessary.
The key to keep in mind is that while AI has dramatically accelerated the pace of change it hasn’t altered the need for traditional, and long familiar IT governance and controls around their assets, identities, access, authentication and authentication, O’Connel says. “The IT maintenance and housekeeping elements still matter.” When organizations have supercharged tools which they are not entirely sure how to govern, they need to make sure those fundamentals remain in place.
In enabling better resilience organization should also evaluate what impact third parties could have on their ability to quick restore operations, O’Connell says. For years, organizations have used questionnaires and external vendor risk-scoring services to try and assess third-part risk. In the AI era, security teams need to go a step further with their most critical suppliers, he adds. O’Connell suggested organizations have their technical architects work with their counterparts at third-party suppliers to understand how critical services are actually configured and what would happen if a provider experienced a breach or a disruption.
Originally published on Dark Reading
