CORE Media in association with World Wide Technology (WWT), Cisco and ExaGrid, curated an exclusive closed-door session on ‘Building Cyber Resilience for the AI-Driven Enterprise’ in Mumbai.
Anoop Mathur, Founder, CORE Media Group, facilitated the discussion with Javed Khan, Head of Enterprise Business, World Wide Technology; Ninad Katkar, Director & Head of Security Business India & SAARC, Cisco; and Derek Ludvigson, Global Alliances Sales Director, ExaGrid.
CIOs highlighted a growing concern around disaster recovery preparedness, questioning whether organizations have the capabilities to restore critical operations quickly and maintain business continuity during disruptions.
Addressing these challenges, Javed highlighted the organization's scale and investments, noting that it is a $30 billion revenue company with $6 billion dedicated to cybersecurity. He also emphasized a $1 billion investment in advanced labs comprising 500 racks, enabling enterprises to simulate their own environments, validate backup and disaster recovery strategies, and test cyber resilience in realistic scenarios. With pre-built testing environments, Lab-as-a-Service capability, and a dedicated AI lab, organizations can assess recovery readiness, reduce risks, and strengthen business continuity before deployment.
Ninad and Derek emphasized that effective cyber resilience goes beyond disaster recovery, requiring organizations to rapidly detect, contain, and recover from cyber incidents. By leveraging integrated cyber resilience capabilities, built-in security stacks, and compatibility with leading data protection platforms, enterprises can secure critical workloads, accelerate backend recovery, and ensure business continuity even in the event of a breach.
Manufacturing industry CIOs raised critical questions around disaster recovery readiness, emphasizing the need to understand where organizations stand in their recovery capabilities. As IT and OT environments become increasingly integrated, ensuring secure and seamless data flow across the entire ecosystem has emerged as a growing challenge. They also stressed the importance of bringing business operations back online quickly following a cyber risk or attack, while highlighting the need for faster asset discovery to improve visibility, response, and overall cyber resilience.
Responding to these priorities, Javed emphasized that organizations, particularly in manufacturing environments, must first identify the operational impact of a disruption before initiating recovery. He highlighted that effective cyber resilience depends on the seamless integration of people, processes, and technology to enable a coordinated and efficient response.
CIOs emphasized the importance of avoiding dependency on a single OEM while building a diversified and resilient technology ecosystem. They also questioned what guardrails organizations should establish to strengthen governance, mitigate risks, and enable the creation of secure, virtualized ecosystems that support greater flexibility and resilience.
Ninad emphasized the need to unify heterogeneous security environments through a single orchestration and visibility platform that integrates multiple vendors. He also highlighted the importance of transitioning from reactive security operations to proactive monitoring, enabling organizations to detect, manage, and respond to threats with greater speed and efficiency.
Nisith Singh, Director, GSI Systems Engineering, ExaGrid, highlighted that the backup platform uses machine learning-driven anomaly detection to identify potential threats. Upon detecting an anomaly, it automatically extends the data retention lock by 30 days, quarantines the impacted data, and facilitates granular-level investigation to ensure secure and precise recovery.
A key challenge for CIOs is ensuring comprehensive protection of data at rest, in transit, and during use. Addressing this challenge, Nisith explained that the solution is built on an air-gapped architecture embedded within every appliance, enabling organizations to isolate critical backup data while ensuring rapid recovery in the event of a cyberattack. He highlighted the platform's multi-site cyber vault capabilities, which strengthen resilience across distributed environments. Data remains fully encrypted both in transit and at rest, with end-to-end encrypted tunnels securing every transfer. The solution also supports disaster recovery to the cloud, while an intelligent data mover facilitates the secure transfer of backup data to the primary cyber vault, ensuring efficient protection and recovery.
