Business security is undergoing a transformative shift as organizations face escalating threats such as ransomware and operational disruptions.

Cyber resilience has emerged as a critical strategy, leveraging innovations in artificial intelligence, automation and real-time analytics to redefine how companies safeguard their operations. No longer a mere contingency plan, resilience is now a foundational element of business strategies, driving stability, protecting data and ensuring long-term growth in an increasingly interconnected and volatile digital landscape, according to Dave Vellante (pictured, left), co-founder and chief analyst at theCUBE Research.

TheCUBE Research’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante discuss business security.

“The rise of ransomware [has] caused completely new thinking,” Vellante said. “Whereas cyber recovery and backup and data protection used to be sort of an afterthought, it became an adjacency to cybersecurity. Now it’s a fundamental component of business resiliency and cybersecurity strategies.”

Vellante spoke with John Furrier (right), executive analyst at theCUBE Research, as part of the day two kickoff at the Cyber Resiliency Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how businesses are adopting cyber resilience strategies, powered by AI, automation and real-time analytics, to strengthen business security, enhance data protection and ensure operational continuity against threats such as ransomware.

Innovations in cyber resilience redefining business security

Cyber resilience, once narrowly focused on disaster recovery, is expanding its role within the broader cybersecurity and business resilience framework. The transition reflects a growing awareness that conventional backup and recovery strategies are insufficient against sophisticated threats including ransomware.

“This has been a kind of a … very specific segment scope in the industry,” Furrier said. “With LLMs and AI, that aperture with cybersecurity is increasing. It’s kind of horizontal. It’s expanded to other capabilities because resilience is a concept that’s well understood by CISOs across apps. There’s actually resilience involved in the automation center as agents come in.”

The rise of ransomware has underscored the critical need for strong recovery mechanisms. Traditional approaches, such as tape-based backups, have evolved into comprehensive systems that integrate with cyber defenses. AI’s ability to streamline tasks, identify vulnerabilities and enhance real-time decision-making is transforming the storage and recovery sectors into proactive, intelligence-driven ecosystems, according to Vellante.

“The new here is really automation and AI, how you can inject AI for a number of things,” he said. “One is to lower cost and drive out a lot of those mundane tasks, whether it’s reporting, getting better analytics and also just doing more with automation because people are drowning in things like alerts.”

Collaboration and innovation driving the future of cyber resilience

Community-driven innovation is central to advancing cyber resilience. By bringing together CISOs, technology experts and consultants, organizations can share insights, discuss best practices and collaboratively tackle pressing challenges. Groundbreaking research initiatives that leverage surveys and interviews provide data-driven strategies to address these issues.

“You’ll see a lot of these summits come from theCUBE Research team building on the success of what we’re doing here with NYSE Wired, where we want to bring in much more velocity to conversations, bring people together, get the data, share that in real-time, high-frequency insights,” Furrier said.

The industry’s pivot toward resilience also embraces a horizontal expansion of its focus, moving beyond storage to include applications, automation and even advanced machine learning capabilities. This expansion reflects the growing interconnectivity of IT systems, where resilience is not confined to disaster recovery but spans predictive planning and operational continuity, according to Vellante.

“That’s where AI is coming in, but also doing predictive analytics, looking at anomalies, trying to identify areas where there are exposures, tracking ransomware before … they can exfiltrate the data and encrypt your data and setting up practical operating principles so that you can air gap, so that you can recover from those air gaps,” he explained. “You can minimize the amount of data that you lose, RPO and get very fast recovery times. That’s really closing that aperture, if you will, of exposure so that companies can just be more business resilient.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Cyber Resiliency Summit:

Photo: SiliconANGLE