Now that Rubrik is a public company, it plans to double down on its investments in artificial intelligence (AI) to enable organizations to improve their overall cyber resiliency.

Last year Rubrik launched Ruby, a generative AI tool that recommends how to isolate and recover data impacted by a ransomware attack that was detected by a Rubrik Anomaly Detection engine.

The next step, said Rubrik CTO Arvind “Nitro” Nithrakashyap, is to further leverage AI to reduce the level of expertise required by IT and cybersecurity teams to proactively achieve and maintain cyber resilience. For example, beyond providing recommendations, an AI platform should automatically identify the last known version of a file that has not been infected and initiate a recovery.

The overall goal is to reduce the time to recover from a ransomware attack that today often takes too long, said Nithrakashyap. It’s not uncommon for organizations to recover from an attack, but the process simply takes too long. As a result, some organizations pay to ransom their data simply because they will lose too much revenue before they fully recover.

Additionally, the overall stress the organization experiences should decline because rather than racing against the clock to manually perform a series of tasks. Instead, an IT team should orchestrate a set of automated tasks that run as needed, Nithrakashyap noted.

Certainly, organizations are realizing that they need to proactively ensure resiliency in an era where breaches are all but inevitable, said Nithrakashyap.

The level of cyber resiliency today varies widely. The smaller the organization, the more likely that its IT and security operations (SecOps) are managed cohesively. In larger organizations, however, backup and recovery are often managed by an IT team while a separate SecOps team focuses on cybersecurity workflows. Achieving cyber resilience, however, requires organizations to invoke backup and recovery tools that are managed by IT teams. As such, there is a clear need to bridge cultural divides between IT and cybersecurity teams; that should be simpler to achieve as more tasks are automated.

In the meantime, organizations should expect cyberattacks to continue to increase in volume and sophistication. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the same advances in AI and automation to reduce the cost of launching attacks that with each iteration are becoming more lethal. In many cases, organizations now find themselves involved in an AI arms race with cybercriminals that have a lot more financial resources at their disposal.

Hopefully, AI will provide more benefits to defenders than attackers. However, there may be a gap between when the ferocity of cyberattacks increases and organizations can upgrade their cybersecurity infrastructure. Those that are not able to keep pace with the level of investment required, however, will soon find they are simply not resilient enough to continue operating.

Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash