Key Takeaways

  • AI-powered threats demand AI-powered cyber resilience: Cyberattacks are becoming more automated and sophisticated as malicious actors leverage AI, requiring organizations to adopt AI-driven resilience strategies rather than traditional reactive approaches.
  • Backup data is an untapped business asset: Protected data repositories should be activated for business intelligence rather than sitting dormant, reducing the heavy lifting required by AI pipelines and accelerating time to insights while maintaining compliance.
  • Three-pillar resilience framework: Modern cyber resilience requires predictive intelligence (staying ahead of threats), proactive defense (zero trust and defense-in-depth), and reactive capability (clean point recovery after breaches).
  • Conversational AI democratizes security: Natural language interfaces reduce cognitive burden and enable faster investigation and response, making sophisticated resilience capabilities accessible to broader teams.
  • Platform convergence is essential: Unified platforms that integrate backup, data management, cybersecurity, and AI enablement reduce complexity and maximize value extraction from existing infrastructure.

The cybersecurity landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation. As AI reshapes how organizations protect their data, AI-powered cyber resilience is replacing traditional recovery strategies with intelligent, proactive defense.

In a recent conversation with Vidya Shankaran, Field CTO for Cloud Security and Emerging Technology at Commvault, we explored how enterprises are navigating this critical shift, and why the intersection of AI and cyber resilience represents both unprecedented opportunity and heightened urgency.

Watch the full conversation here:

The New Threat Landscape

The democratization of AI has created a double-edged sword. While legitimate businesses leverage AI to enhance operations and decision-making, malicious actors have equal access to these same capabilities. The result? Cyberattacks are becoming more automated, sophisticated, and polymorphic in nature.

“When you have malicious actors evolving with AI by their side, it’s only natural that defense mechanisms and resilience mechanisms also adapt that same strategy where AI is foundational,” Shankaran explains.

This evolution demands more than incremental improvements to existing security frameworks. It requires a complete rethinking of how organizations approach data protection, recovery, and utilization.

Beyond Backup: Unlocking Hidden Value

Commvault’s recent launches of conversational AI capabilities and data rooms signal a significant shift in thinking about enterprise resilience. Rather than treating backup data as dormant insurance policies, these innovations transform protected repositories into active business assets.

The concept centers on a crucial insight: organizations shouldn’t need to mine extensively to extract meaningful information from their data. By activating protected repositories, companies can reduce the heavy lifting that AI pipelines typically require; discovering, preparing, and exporting data for business consumption.

“If we’re able to activate the business value of protected repositories, it automatically solves for the front-of-funnel problem that AI pipelines have today,” Shankaran notes. This approach not only accelerates time to insights but also maintains compliance and data trust—critical considerations that often get overlooked in the rush to implement AI.

The Three Pillars of Modern Resilience: Advice for Business Leaders

During our conversation, Shankaran shared a comprehensive framework for business leaders to use to think about cyber resilience that extends well beyond traditional recovery planning:

Predictive Intelligence: By expanding ecosystem integrations, organizations can stay ahead of malicious actors, identifying potential threat vectors before attacks occur. This superpower of prediction provides a critical advantage in an increasingly hostile digital environment.

Proactive Defense: Zero trust architecture has moved from differentiator to table stakes. Organizations must harden every element of their IT landscape, adopting defense-in-depth philosophies that make it exponentially harder for attackers to penetrate systems. This includes building muscle memory through clean room environments where teams can iterate on cyber resilience runbooks.

Reactive Capability: Even with the best preparation, breaches happen. Advanced threat scanning capabilities enable organizations to identify clean points of recovery, minimizing contamination risks and preventing reinfection during restoration processes.

The Conversational Revolution

Perhaps most intriguing is the emergence of natural language interfaces for data protection and cyber recovery. Commvault’s conversational AI represents more than convenience; it fundamentally changes how security and IT teams interact with their environments.

By reducing cognitive burden and enabling faster investigation and response times, conversational interfaces democratize access to complex resilience capabilities. Teams can ingest logs, summarize findings, and take action through natural dialogue rather than manual querying, all while maintaining policy-driven automation guardrails.

This shift toward conversational technology reflects a broader humanization of our relationship with enterprise systems, making sophisticated capabilities accessible to broader teams while reducing opportunities for human error.

Platform Convergence

The convergence of once-separate disciplines — backup, data management, cybersecurity, and AI enablement — into unified platforms represents another critical evolution. When everything revolves around data, fragmented tools create unnecessary complexity and missed opportunities.

A single pane of glass for data protection, management, security, and AI activation multiplies the value organizations can extract from their existing infrastructure. This unified experience accelerates time to value while ensuring consistent governance and compliance across all data activities.

The Path Forward

As organizations stand at the precipice of this transformation, Shankaran offers clear guidance: treat technology vendors as true partners. The rapid evolution of AI and cyber resilience means building the bridge while crossing the chasm.

“There’s no right or wrong answer — everything is viable that fits business requirements, but it has to meet basic standards of ethical adoption of technology,” she emphasizes.

The future of enterprise resilience isn’t about choosing between protection and activation, recovery and innovation. It’s about embracing a holistic approach where data becomes an intelligent asset — secured, trusted, and ready to deliver value at every stage of its lifecycle.

 

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

 

Read more of my coverage:

Commvault Makes Conversation the New Interface for Enterprise Cyber Resilience

Unlocking the Hidden Value: How Commvault’s Data Rooms Transform Backup Data into AI Assets