Moving beyond cybersecurity: How Indian enterprises can achieve true cyber resilience

By Mayank Mishra, Senior Regional Director for India and SAARC, Cohesity

India has gone digital at a fast and massive scale. In just a few years, platforms like Aadhaar (digital identity), UPI (real-time payments), and DigiLocker (secure digital document storage) have become indispensable tools for hundreds of millions of people.

This reliance means that security is not just an IT concern but a critical national imperative. If any of these digital platforms are compromised by malicious actors or technical glitches, it could quickly escalate into a national crisis. Such a crisis would put sensitive data and vital services at risk, eroding public trust.

As India’s digital backbone continues to expand, so does the interest of global threat actors. Regardless of tactics – whether it is ransomware, phishing, or destructive malware, attackers are targeting the very systems that power the economy and society.

At the policy level, the government’s IndiaAI Mission has emerged as a major national agenda, with its Safe & Trusted AI pillar focusing on responsible, secure, and resilient AI deployment.

Why Traditional Cybersecurity Isn’t Enough
Many organisations invest millions in cybersecurity tools and teams. So why are data theft and ransomware still so common? This is because all too often, cybersecurity budgets are mainly focused on prevention and detection, aiming to stop or disrupt an attack before data is stolen or encrypted.

The reality is that attackers have become too adept at evading these defences. Ransomware-as-a-Service makes attacks scalable, patch bypasses leave systems exposed, and security updates are being successfully reverse-engineered almost as soon as they’re released. Phishing has also become more convincing, with generative AI making social-engineering messages faster to produce and harder to spot.
The impact goes far beyond IT departments. Payment outages, hospital downtime, and supply chain disruptions can affect the daily lives of millions of people, not just businesses themselves.

For instance, a ransomware attack on a technology service provider in 2024 had resulted in National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) temporarily isolating nearly 300 small Indian local banks from the payment systems. This disrupted UPI and ATM services for millions of customers until containment and recovery efforts restored normal operations.

With adversaries advancing so rapidly, even the most well-resourced organisations should recognise that cyber incidents are inevitable, rather than a mere possibility. There is a growing consensus that regulators and leadership teams should shift towards resilience, continuity, and recovery, beyond cybersecurity.

Defining Cyber Resilience

While the exact definition of cyber resilience varies across standards and professional organisations, it is essentially the ability to prepare for, respond to, recover securely and continue operations during and after a cyber incident to minimise business disruption, and protect customer trust.

You can’t buy cyber resilience, per se. It’s neither a product, nor a policy. It’s a strategic capability, built on the right combination of people, processes, technology, and governance.

Products from information security vendors can certainly help, but they won’t deliver cyber resilience by themselves. They need to be put to work in a coordinated way that actually strengthens operations.
The same goes for the security operations team. If threat modelling and asset management are inadequate, even skilled staff may be looking in the wrong places, leaving gaps attackers can exploit.

At the end of the day, it’s not a question of if an attack will happen, but when. Cyber resilience means being ready for that moment. It also means being ready for faster breach reporting and response expectations, which are increasingly central to India’s privacy and security landscape.

Pathways to Cyber Resilience
If we think of cyber resilience as a chain, every link needs to be strong and reliable. Weaknesses drag down the overall ability to withstand attacks, which is why adopting proven resilience frameworks and recovery best practices is essential for strengthening the entire chain.

For the most cyber resilient organisations, resilience is systematic and comprehensive. Among other best practices, they ensure sensitive data is backed up globally, multifactor authentication and admin controls are enforced, threat intelligence is maximised, recovery is secured through remediation, and compliance safeguards are consistently met. Additionally, cyber recovery runbooks should be automated, and minimum viable recovery exercises conducted regularly. Integrating IT and security operations with ongoing attack simulations and drills will help teams stay sharp and ready for real-world threats. This is especially important as ransomware continues to use double-extortion tactics and supply-chain compromise routes that can bypass traditional perimeter controls.

A practical approach to strengthening cyber resilience includes five key steps: discover and protect all sensitive and critical data, ensure data is always recoverable, detect and investigate threats by continuously scanning and analysing backup data for any compromise, practise application resilience to validate and improve successful recovery outcomes and optimise data risk posture and prioritise critical data for recovery.

Keeping India’s Digital Engines Running
Digital is no longer optional – it is expanding, and so are the risks that come with it. India’s digital future is now being shaped by parallel priorities: secure data governance through the DPDP Act and trustworthy AI under the IndiaAI Mission. Indian enterprises must shift their mindset from cybersecurity to cyber resilience, and now is the time to act.

True resilience means protecting customers, maintaining business continuity, and sustaining trust in India’s digital economy.

When a cyberattack strikes and it will every organisation has a duty to keep disruption to a bare minimum. The organisations that invest in resilience now will be better positioned to support India’s broader digital and AI ambitions while protecting trust at scale.