Industry leaders are urging Indian enterprises to move beyond traditional backup strategies and adopt comprehensive cyber resilience frameworks, warning that attackers now target recovery systems alongside primary data stores.

The call comes ahead of World Backup Day on 31 March, with this year’s theme highlighting the shift from basic backup to full cyber resilience. Technology executives from Lenovo, Zscaler, Veeam Software, Techno Digital and Cloudera told TechObserver.in that backup strategies designed as an afterthought are failing businesses when needed most.

Advertisement

‹

EVENT

Infosec Reimagined

Infosec Reimagined 2026 is the premier information security summit where top leaders—CISOs, CROs, CIOs, CTOs and risk executives—converge to redefine cyber resilience.

📅 Fri, 22 May 2026

📍 Dehradun

Register Now →

EVENT

CIO Prism

CIO Prism unites forward-thinking technology leaders to exchange transformative insights, shape digital strategies, and foster innovation, empowering enterprises to excel in an era of rapid technological change.

📅 Fri, 18 Sep 2026

📍 Goa

Register Now →

›

Sandeep Bhambure, Vice President and Managing Director, India and SAARC at Veeam Software, said organisations should treat backups as a board-level issue because “trust in data is one of the most valuable assets any organisation has”. He described backups as “the final line of truth” at a time “when AI can invent information, ransomware can lock data away and a single misconfiguration can ripple through an entire system in minutes”.

Why backup alone no longer protects businesses

Suvabrata Sinha, CISO in Residence at Zscaler, said attackers are using artificial intelligence to become more effective. He warned that criminals now encrypt both primary data and backup repositories to prevent recovery without ransom payment.

“Post compromise, they are not only encrypting data stores and key systems for ransom, they are also locking up the backup repositories to prevent any attempted recovery without paying ransom,” Sinha said.

He added that organisations must ensure recovery systems receive the same level of security as primary infrastructure. Zero Trust architecture, a security model that requires verification for every user and device attempting to access resources, must extend to backup management systems, he noted.

Bhambure struck a similar note, saying World Backup Day is “a timely reminder for boards and IT leaders to strengthen data resilience and ensure comprehensive backup strategies are in place”—particularly as AI becomes embedded in workflows and decision making.

Data resilience becomes business priority for Indian enterprises

Srinivas Rao, Managing Director for India at Lenovo ISG, said data resilience has become fundamental to business continuity as Indian enterprises accelerate their use of artificial intelligence.

Advertisement

With real-time inferencing, the process where AI systems make predictions using live data, now running across distributed environments spanning edge locations, data centres and hybrid cloud systems, ensuring data availability and rapid recovery is critical, Rao said.

“Cyber threats, system failures and human errors constantly put businesses at risk, making backup a strategic priority rather than a reactive measure,” he added.

Bhambure argued that the shift is no longer just about restoring files after an incident. “Immutable backups, continuous threat monitoring and regularly tested recovery processes are essential—not just to recover data, but to keep the business operational and confident in the integrity of the data it relies on,” he said.

Infrastructure failures drive need for distributed backup

Avaneesh Vats, Vice President for Information Technology at Techno Digital, said backup must evolve from a storage function to a resilience architecture.

Failures are no longer limited to system outages or cyber incidents, he noted. Power disruptions, network instability, regional outages and geopolitical factors all pose risks. Backup strategies not designed for these realities tend to fail when most needed.

“Backup strategies that are not designed for this reality tend to fail when they are needed the most,” Vats said.

He argued that effective backup requires geographic distribution, isolation from primary systems, regular validation and alignment with infrastructure guaranteeing uptime and latency consistency.

“As India’s data centre ecosystem scales, resilience will not be defined by how much data is stored, but by how confidently it can be restored under pressure, at scale and without compromise,” Vats added.

Economic sustainability of backup investments questioned

Piyush Agarwal, SE Leader for India at Cloudera, said organisations must assess whether backup investments are improving business resilience in an economically sustainable manner.

With World Backup Day coinciding with growing cloud security concerns, Agarwal said the focus should shift from volume of backups to quality of recovery outcomes.

Industry executives expect Indian enterprises to increase spending on data protection and recovery solutions through 2026 as regulatory requirements tighten and cyber threats grow more sophisticated. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 has added compliance pressures around data handling and breach notification.

Organisations seeking to strengthen their backup and recovery posture should conduct regular recovery drills, ensure backup systems operate on isolated networks and verify that restoration processes work under realistic stress conditions, according to the executives. Bhambure warned that too many organisations still respond only after damage is done—“too many organisations still manage risk reactively, when real progress starts with resilient, trusted data”.