The practice of building cybersecurity directly into networks and databases has taken on greater importance in the new era of agentic AI.

Trust boundaries are being relocated to the database itself, where access policies can be enforced regardless of the instructions an AI agent has received. This has become particularly significant in light of recent high-profile breaches involving agents that escaped from model provider labs.

“What agentic has done is it really has solidified the fact that even very mature security programs, at some point, will likely fail,” said theCUBE Research’s Krista Case (pictured, right). “Now, with agentic AI, we have these new agentic-fueled attacks that are making all of the headlines. So, when it comes to cyber resilience and business resilience, the impact that this has had is that it’s really become a part of the security conversation. It really needs to be built in up front because there is a recognition that we cannot just build the fences high enough.”

Case spoke with Dave Vellante (left) at Oracle’s “AI Cyberattacks Are Escalating: How to Secure Your Data Now” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. In a post-event analysis, they discussed key takeaways from interviews with Oracle’s security leaders and industry analysts. (* Disclosure below.)

Securing data and preparing for recovery

During the Oracle event, executives spoke about bringing security to the data. In the current climate, where AI has become more capable of breaching defenses, understanding where critical data resides and having a robust recovery plan is even more essential. Attackers equipped with AI can operate at machine scale, compressing response windows and forcing organizations to reconsider where security controls are placed and how quickly they can recover when defenses fail.

That shift is also complicating the traditional cloud-era shared responsibility model. Vellante and Case described an emerging shared accountability model in which vendors remain responsible for ensuring their products operate securely and as promised, while customers must understand the criticality of their assets, establish policies and determine how much risk they are willing to accept.

“The mainspring of innovation at Oracle has always been the core database,” Vellante said. “Oracle’s philosophy is you’ve got to secure at the source, at the data, take the burden off the application. You, the customer, are responsible for understanding the criticality of your assets. The vendor is responsible for making sure that the product is safe, that when it takes action it does so in a governed way, as advertised and as promised. Recovery is a big deal.”

As AI agents begin making decisions and taking actions across business systems, however, recovery increasingly extends beyond restoring the data itself. Organizations also need to determine what constitutes a trusted operational state and how to return business processes and functions to that point following an incident.

“Recovering data is still incredibly fundamental, but it has to go much beyond that,” Case said. “We need to be able to have that understanding of a trusted good state of business … having that understanding and also having an understanding of what it means to get the business back to that point. So, it goes again beyond data, even beyond applications and systems, to having that understanding of these business processes and functions and what it means to again roll them back or get them back online.”

That broader definition of recovery introduces questions that conventional disaster recovery plans may not fully address, including what an AI agent was attempting to accomplish when an incident occurred, which systems or processes were affected and who has the authority to determine when the business can safely resume operations. It also places greater emphasis on building resilience into systems before an attack occurs rather than relying exclusively on detection and response afterward.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle’s “AI Cyberattacks Are Escalating: How to Secure Your Data Now” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Oracle’s “AI Cyberattacks Are Escalating: How to Secure Your Data Now” event. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE