Building cyber resilience at scale calls for integrating security into storage

A recent incident of massive outage by a major cloud infrastructure caused widespread disruption, taking banks, financial software platforms, and social networks offline for hours. The incident once again underscored how deeply the digital economy depends on centralised infrastructure and how a single point of failure can ripple across industries and economies.

The impact was instantaneous and was felt across the world. Banks, financial software platforms, and social media networks went offline for hours. It showed, yet again, how heavily the digital economy relies on centralised infrastructure - and how a single point of failure can cause ripples across industries and economies. As enterprises scale up digital transformation and cloud adoption, the above incident serves as a reminder that resilience can no longer be treated as a contingency plan; it has to be ingrained in data strategy. Because at the heart of every digital business lies its most critical and vulnerable asset: data.

Data is possibly the most valuable commodity in the enterprise world today and is also the most vulnerable asset in an increasingly connected world. As Indian enterprises undergo digital transformation, they open themselves up to a multitude of cyber threats and other disruptions, such as natural disasters. Cybersecurity incidents in India more than doubled from 10.29 lakh in 2022 to 22.68 lakh in 2024, and these will only grow in volume and sophistication with cyber criminals increasingly adopting AI tools. An IDC survey revealed that almost 72% of Indian organisations experienced AI-powered cyberattacks in the past year. Worryingly, in an industry survey conducted earlier this year, nearly 74% of

Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) admitted that their organisations were not adequately prepared to deal with cyberattacks. 
To combat these threats, a more integrated and comprehensive approach is clearly required, one that unites cyber security with data storage.

The importance of embedding security into data storage

Traditional security approaches often overlook the storage layer - the very foundation where critical data resides. The result: missed threat signals, longer downtimes, and fractured recovery processes. Success in business today depends on how effectively companies manage and secure data across their global data estate.

The standard approach to cyber defense – deploying multiple point solutions while excluding the storage platform – simply doesn’t work. It leaves organizations vulnerable by missing threats hidden within the data itself. What’s needed is an integrated and connected data strategy that embeds security directly into data storage and architecture – one that proactively detects threats, protects against destructive attacks, and enables rapid, confident recovery.

Cyber-resilient storage is that missing link. It amplifies both cybersecurity and recovery efforts through layered resilience – snapshots, replication, backups, and cloud vaulting that ensure data availability even if one layer fails. Built on zero-trust principles, immutable data, and deep integration with analytics and security operations, it transforms storage from a passive repository into a powerful, active line of defense. By securing every layer of the storage stack, organisations can reduce risk and ensure that recovery mechanisms are safe, trusted, and verifiable.

Building secure, scalable and adaptive data architectures

Storage security should be a first-class citizen, with multiple defensive layers and orchestrated responses across all of them. Speed is of the essence; any anomaly should trigger an alert or an automated containment protocol before any damage occurs.

The real cost of an attack is downtime. Organisations must therefore ensure that applications can restart safely, and backup data can be trusted. The ability to immediately restore mission-critical applications during a cyber incident reduces operational impact and stress. Mission-critical systems should therefore have a forward-looking security posture.

There are a couple of particularly effective approaches. One is the Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) - an architectural approach that not only simplifies data management but also strengthens cyber resilience. With an EDC architecture, IT teams can centrally manage a virtualised data cloud with unified control across on-premises, public cloud, and hybrid environments. This unified model enables intelligent, autonomous data management with built-in data protection, immutability, and zero-trust principles woven into its core. By combining governance, automation, and integrated security, EDC empowers organisations to detect, contain, and recover from cyber incidents faster - ensuring that data remains both accessible and uncompromised across the entire environment.

The other is isolated recovery environments (IREs), which allow businesses to non-disruptively test and validate applications and data, or to remediate and recover from malicious attacks without impacting a production environment.
Today, cyber resilience can also be delivered as a service by replacing fragmented, manual processes with a unified, policy-driven automation approach. Some solutions enable enterprise-wide fleet-wide visibility, automation, and clean data recovery. These solutions strengthen security, accelerate time-to-recovery, and reduce total cost of ownership.

The way forward

One of the ways enterprises can mitigate this risk is by adopting a combination of multi-cloud and hybrid strategies and edge computing. This will distribute workloads across multiple environments and reduce dependency on any one provider. However, decentralisation alone isn’t enough; it must be complemented by embedding security into each layer – especially at the storage level – to minimise vulnerabilities.

The goal must be ‘secure decentralisation’, where data is distributed for performance and sovereignty, but is protected uniformly across every environment. Because business success today depends not just on how companies use data, but how well they secure and sustain it.

Sudharsan Aravamuthan

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Sudharsan Aravamuthan is Head of Systems Engineering, India at Pure Storage.