By Sandeep Pendharkar, Sr. Director & GM – Services, Software & Consumption Services, HPE India
Ransomware remains one of the most persistent threats to enterprise operations, with the potential to disrupt critical services, compromise data and cause extended downtime.
As enterprises operate across data centers, cloud, edge and increasingly AI-driven environments, the traditional security perimeter has become harder to define. Users, identities, applications, data and workloads are now distributed across the enterprise.
The question facing Indian business and technology leaders has quietly shifted. It is no longer only “How do we stop an attack?”, but also, “How do we maintain business continuity and trust when disruption occurs?”
The Evolving Threat Landscape
AI is reshaping both sides of the cybersecurity equation. Enterprises are using it to strengthen security operations, automate detection and improve response times significantly. But in the meanwhile, threat actors use the same technology to launch convincing phishing campaigns at scale and automated attacks that move through networks faster than human teams can respond.
Ransomware also increasingly puts recovery environments in the line of attack. If backup and recovery systems are compromised along with production environments, organisations can lose one of their most important paths to restoring operations. At that point, a cybersecurity incident can rapidly become a business continuity crisis.
Why This Matters for India
India’s digital growth has made cyber resilience a boardroom priority. According to the FICCI-EY Risk Survey 2026, 51% of Indian organisations rank cybersecurity breaches and attacks as the top risk to organisational performance. India’s economy increasingly relies on large-scale digital payments, digital public services and connected operations across sectors such as BFSI and manufacturing.
The DPDP Act adds another dimension. By giving citizens more control over their personal data and holding organisations accountable for how it is stored and managed, it links cyber resilience directly to digital trust. Knowing where sensitive data sits, who can access it, and how quickly it can be recovered is now central to earning that trust. A breach involving personal data is no longer just an operational setback; it chips away at confidence in India’s digital economy.
Prevention Alone Is No Longer Enough
Prevention still matters, but it cannot be the whole strategy. Consider how a city prepares for floods. It does not rely solely on taller walls. It invests in drainage, backup power, and emergency plans so that life can continue when the water gets in. Enterprises need the same mindset.
That mindset begins with knowing what matters most. Organisations need to understand which systems the business truly depends on, then protect them accordingly. Not everything needs the same safeguards, but the most critical systems need more than a traditional backup. Backups store data but they are slow to recover from, and rebuilding a site after a ransomware attack can take days. Protecting data continuously, paired with real-time detection, cuts that loss to seconds and sharply limits the damage.
Resilience Must Be Built Into the Architecture
Crucially, cyber resilience cannot be retrofitted after systems are deployed. Adding recovery capabilities once an environment is live tends to leave gaps that attackers are quick to exploit. Resilience must be embedded across compute, storage, networking, cloud, data, and AI environments from the outset. The DSCI Cyber Security Outlook 2026 identifies “resilience-by-design” as a key cybersecurity priority2, and the industry’s direction bears this out.
One approach gaining traction is the cyber vault, a sealed-off space that holds protected copies of critical data which cannot be changed or deleted, even by someone using stolen administrator credentials. The strongest designs pair the vault with a clean, separate environment for recovery, because restoring applications into a network that is still compromised simply invites a second attack.
What happens on the day of an incident matters just as much. Recovering hundreds of workloads by hand can stretch downtime into days; however, automated tools that bring interconnected applications back online in the right order can reduce that to minutes. And because a recovery plan is only as good as its last test, organisations must rehearse recovery regularly without disrupting production.
The Bottom Line
Cyber resilience is not a compliance checklist or a collection of security tools. It is an architectural capability that enables organisations to maintain trust, ensure continuity, and adapt to an increasingly complex threat landscape.
For Indian enterprises, the opportunity is to treat resilience as a foundation for growth rather than an insurance policy. The organisations that can anticipate, withstand, and rapidly recover from cyberattacks will be the ones customers, regulators, and partners trust most. They will define the next era of digital trust in India.