Why Rubrik believes cyber resilience, not prevention, is the next frontier

Artificial intelligence is changing cybersecurity on both sides of the equation. While enterprises are using AI to automate operations and strengthen their security posture, attackers are using the same technology to identify vulnerabilities, launch more sophisticated attacks, and move far faster than before.

According to Ananth Nag, Vice President, APAC at Rubrik, that shift is forcing enterprises to rethink decades of cybersecurity strategy. The question is no longer whether an attack can be stopped. Instead, organizations need to prepare for what happens when one succeeds.

Speaking to YourStory, Nag explains why boards are shifting their focus from prevention to resilience, why recovery has become a business priority, and how AI will reshape enterprise cybersecurity over the coming years.

From prevention to resilience

AI is compressing cyberattack timelines from weeks to seconds, leaving organizations with far less time to respond.

“I've never seen technology take off this quickly,” Nag says. “AI entered our lives only in the last couple of years, but the pace of innovation and adoption has been remarkable.”

That speed is changing the threat landscape. Enterprises have long relied on a familiar cybersecurity model centred on prevention, detection, and remediation. Security teams assessed vulnerabilities, prioritised the most critical risks, and responded before attackers could do significant damage.

Nag argues that this approach was built for an era when attacks unfolded at human speed. AI has changed that.

Threat actors can now automate reconnaissance, identify weaknesses, and exploit them in seconds. As attacks become increasingly autonomous, organizations can no longer assume they'll be able to stop every intrusion before damage is done.

As a result, conversations in boardrooms are changing.

Instead of asking whether a breach can be prevented, leaders are increasingly asking how quickly critical business operations can be restored when one occurs.

Nag points to recent cyber incidents involving global brands such as Jaguar Land Rover and Marks & Spencer, where disruptions lasted for weeks, as examples of why business continuity has become just as important as prevention.

The long-standing security benchmark—detect an intrusion in one minute, contain it in 10, and remediate it within 60—may no longer be sufficient when attacks unfold almost instantly.

“It's taken us 20 years to mature our prevention, detection and remediation philosophy,” Nag says. “Resiliency is the next phase that we are on.”

That doesn't mean prevention is becoming less important. Instead, enterprises need to balance investments in stopping attacks with the ability to recover quickly when systems are compromised.

Recovery is about business continuity

For many organizations, backup strategies still focus on protecting individual systems or applications. Nag believes that approach is no longer enough.

Modern enterprises operate across cloud platforms, on-premises infrastructure, applications, identities, endpoints, and data environments that are deeply interconnected. Restoring a single database or application offers little value if the rest of the business remains offline.

Instead, organizations need to understand what it takes to bring the business back online as a whole.

That means recovering identity services, business applications, cloud workloads, infrastructure, and enterprise data—in the right order. It also requires a consolidated view of where trusted data resides and how systems depend on one another, so recovery can happen without introducing further risk.

Nag says enterprises should stop thinking of backup purely as a storage function and instead treat recovery as a core business continuity capability.

Preparing before a crisis

For Nag, cyber resilience begins well before an attack takes place.

Organizations need to continuously identify clean recovery points, test recovery processes, and ensure that critical systems can be restored without reintroducing compromised data or malware.

“You will get breached,” he says. “The ability to prevent is important, but the ability to recover becomes even more critical for every business.”

That requires organizations to prepare during peacetime rather than trying to build recovery plans in the middle of an incident.

As enterprise environments become more distributed across cloud infrastructure, on-premises systems, applications, and endpoints, the attack surface continues to grow. Those environments also contain an organization's most valuable assets, making them attractive targets for ransomware and other sophisticated attacks.

For Nag, the objective is no longer simply preventing attacks; it is recovering from them at machine speed.

AI will also change how enterprises defend themselves

AI may be making cyberattacks faster and more sophisticated, but Nag believes it will become just as important for defenders.

Security teams are already using AI to automate repetitive tasks, analyze large volumes of security data, and improve response times. Over time, he expects AI to take on a much bigger role, helping organizations detect anomalies, prioritize threats, and automate recovery workflows.

That transition, however, will take time.

Most enterprises operate complex IT environments built over decades, spanning legacy infrastructure, cloud platforms, business applications, and multiple security tools. Integrating AI across these environments requires both investment and operational maturity.

Even so, Nag believes the direction is clear. As AI models become more capable and accessible, enterprises will increasingly rely on intelligent automation to strengthen resilience while reducing the burden on security teams.

The rise of the resilience agent

Nag sees the next stage of cybersecurity as an autonomous resilience agent, an AI-powered system capable of orchestrating recovery across an enterprise with minimal human intervention.

The goal is straightforward. If an incident occurs, business leaders should be able to trigger an intelligent recovery engine that restores applications, infrastructure, identities, and data in the right sequence. Instead of manually coordinating multiple teams during a crisis, enterprises would rely on AI to launch recovery workflows almost instantly.

Rubrik is already moving in that direction by helping customers automate cloud recovery and orchestrate the recovery of business-critical systems, reducing downtime while giving organizations greater confidence in their recovery processes.

Cyber resilience moves into the boardroom

The pace of AI innovation is forcing organizations to rethink more than cybersecurity.

As AI agents become embedded across software development, customer operations, and enterprise applications, enterprise environments will become increasingly autonomous—and significantly more complex. That complexity will expand the attack surface while raising the stakes for business continuity.

Nag believes resilience is becoming a business issue rather than simply an IT concern.

He points to recent cyber incidents that were resolved before they reached the public eye as evidence that rapid, orchestrated recovery can protect not only operations but also revenue, reputation, and customer trust.

In sectors such as financial services, the implications extend beyond individual enterprises. The ability to recover quickly can have wider consequences for the stability of financial systems and the broader economy.

For that reason, he believes boards need to prepare for the assumption that breaches will occur.

As AI continues to reshape both attack and defense, Nag expects resilience to become the defining measure of enterprise cybersecurity. Organizations that invest in recovery, automate critical processes, and regularly test their resilience will be better placed to manage the next generation of AI-driven threats.

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