Cyber resilience has to begin long before a breach

The moment a cyberattack strikes a large organisation, normality fractures into confusion. Systems slow, dashboards flicker and messages pile up faster than anyone can process. In those first minutes, said Arunkumar Selvaraj, global head for security and compliance at TCS Enterprise Cloud, the experience is always brutally disorienting.

Selvaraj, speaking during a panel discussion on cybersecurity, has navigated the recovery path of at least four major attacks, and recalls the sheer physical and mental toll such incidents exact on a cybersecurity team as teams scramble to understand what has broken, what can be saved and how quickly recovery is possible. “It is a nightmare where you do not get sleep,” Selvaraj says.

What determines whether an organisation sinks or steadies itself, he argued, is not frenetic activity in the middle of the crisis but disciplined preparation long before it.

Burgess Cooper, CEO of cybersecurity for Adani Enterprises, put it crisply: “The calm before the storm matters.” He spoke of cyber war games, repeated drills and simulations that force teams to think under ambiguity. “No two attacks are the same,” he said, so the only advantage organisations can cultivate is practiced clarity — the ability to act decisively when information is incomplete and attackers are adapting by the minute.

For Jacxine Fernandez, senior VP for information security at Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL), that clarity carries an added weight. An airport cannot pause operations to regroup during a breach, the runway does not wait for incident triage. “Airports are 24/7,” he said. “Resilience is not about avoiding a breach. It is about living through a compromise and bringing systems back faster and more resilient than before.” If passengers must keep moving and flights must keep taking off, then every supporting function — especially cybersecurity — must align to that operational reality.

AI a double-edged swordAI has made both sides of the battle more complex. Vishak Raman, VP of sales for India, Saarc, SEA & ANZ at Fortinet, described a threat landscape transformed by automation. “AI is supercharging cybercrime,” he said, noting that attacks can now unfold at machine speed, spotting weaknesses and exploiting them before human analysts even register a pattern. But he stressed that defenders have access to the same acceleration. AI, he said, now drives visibility across hybrid cloud environments, enables predictive intelligence at reconnaissance stages and helps security teams reduce the cost of breaches by catching anomalies earlier. “Products are becoming more intelligent,” he said, but their purpose is not to replace engineers, it is to augment them and give them room for higher-value decisions.

The panelists agreed that security must now be designed into systems from the foundation upward. Selvaraj described the shift within global enterprises: security has moved from afterthought to priority. “Security must be the first part of the architecture,” he said, arguing that cloud, AI and multi-tenant environments demand guardrails from day one. He warned that the AI platforms used inside security operations centres must themselves be protected: “We are leveraging AI to detect and respond, but we must also secure the AI workloads.”

Resilience, however, is not just about strong architecture; it is about recoverability. Selvaraj recounted a recent incident in which both primary and secondary data centres were compromised. The organisation survived because it had maintained an isolated third indexing copy of its backup. He described the principle simply: one copy on primary, one offsite, and a third stored separately to allow reconstruction even if ransomware wipes the rest. He urged more organisations to adopt immutable, write-once-readmany backups. “That is what helps you recover faster,” he said.

Quantum threat and opportunity
There is also another looming shift that is getting larger in the horizon: quantum computing. Raman urged companies to begin preparing for what he called a “post-quantum world” by taking inventory of their cryptographic algorithms and studying what might break when they migrate to quantum-safe standards. Burgess likened the coming transition to the Y2K crisis and called it “Y2Q,” noting that India could find itself in a similar moment of opportunity. Just as India’s software talent helped the world navigate Y2K, he said, the country could take a global leadership role in building quantumsecure systems. “We have the people advantage and the scale advantage,” he said, describing India as perfectly positioned for a cybersecurity boom.

Raman echoed that optimism, saying that Fortinet plans to double its India workforce. He pointed out that India already hosts the company’s global threat analysis centre and delivers professional cybersecurity services worldwide. “India can be the cybersec powerhouse for the globe,” he said, citing the country’s engineering talent, cost of delivery and the richness of its digital infrastructure as ideal conditions for building resilient systems.
Throughout the discussion, a recurring theme emerged: technology alone cannot deliver resilience.

Fer nande z explained that attackers now use AI to clone voices, mimic internal communication patterns and game authentication systems — meaning organisations cannot rely solely on sophisticated tooling. Burgess agreed, arguing that “the human element must be respected,” and warning that over-automation simply speeds up inefficiency if underlying processes are flawed. “Tools make you faster, but if your processes are wrong, you will get things wrong faster.”