For years, cyber security and infrastructure lived in separate conversations.
Security teams focused on threats, detection, and response.
Infrastructure teams focused on performance, scale, and cost.
That separation is now breaking down.
In a recent episode of the Smarter Strategic Thinking podcast, Fortuna Data spoke with Panzura about how ransomware, data sprawl, and AI-driven workloads are forcing organisations to rethink where cyber resilience actually belongs and why treating it as a bolt-on security function is increasingly dangerous.
What emerged from the conversation wasn’t a discussion about tools.
It was a reframing of data itself as the new control plane for resilience.
One of the clearest points made in the discussion is that most cyber incidents don’t fail because detection is slow they fail because recovery is.
Enterprises may identify an attack quickly, but still struggle to:
This is especially true in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, where data exists in multiple locations, formats, and copies.
In those environments, infrastructure decisions made years earlier suddenly become the limiting factor in recovery.
A recurring theme in the episode was the unintended complexity created by data duplication.
As organisations adopt:
they often end up with multiple unmanaged copies of the same data.
Each copy increases:
The issue isn’t that organisations chose the wrong tools it’s that data architecture was never designed to act as a unified system under attack conditions.
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The conversation made a clear distinction between backup and resilience a distinction many organisations still blur.
Backup answers one question:
“Can we restore data?”
Resilience answers a harder one:
“Can we restore operations, confidently and quickly, under pressure?”
Traditional backup architectures often assume:
Modern attacks break all three assumptions.
As discussed in the episode, cyber recovery increasingly requires continuous awareness of data state, not just periodic snapshots stored elsewhere.
One of the most important insights from the discussion is that cyber resilience is shifting down the stack.
Instead of relying solely on:
organisations are embedding resilience into how data is:
This isn’t about replacing security teams it’s about acknowledging that infrastructure design now directly influences security outcomes.
When data architecture fragments, resilience fragments with it.
The episode also addressed immutability a term often reduced to a checkbox.
Immutability only delivers value when:
When immutability exists in isolated silos, it can protect data but still leave recovery slow, manual, or incomplete.
The broader point made in the discussion is that immutability must align with how data moves, not just where it sits.
AI came up repeatedly not as hype, but as a practical stressor on existing infrastructure models.
AI-driven workloads:
As noted in the conversation, infrastructure built without AI-era assumptions struggles to keep up — especially when resilience requirements are layered on top.
The result is not just higher cost, but higher operational risk.
Rather than prescribing solutions, the episode surfaced a set of strategic questions IT leaders should be asking:
These questions expose gaps long before an incident does.
The key takeaway from this episode is subtle but important:
Cyber resilience is no longer just about defending against threats.
It’s about designing infrastructure that can absorb disruption without losing trust, data, or momentum.
As data environments grow more distributed and AI-driven, resilience becomes less about reacting and more about architecting for inevitability.
This article is based on the full discussion with Panzura on the Smarter Strategic Thinking podcast.
