When Cyber Recovery Becomes Leadership’s Job

·34 min·3 clips

Host Rich Bradbury explains why cyber recovery is now a boardroom issue, not just an IT problem.

The episode begins with host Rich Bradbury introducing the topic of cyber recovery as a leadership issue, moving beyond IT to involve reputation and business continuity. Guest Kavita Mariapan, Chief Transformation Officer at Rubrik, joins to explore this shift. She explains that recovery has become an enterprise assurance topic, with ransomware incidents costing tens of millions and causing months of disruption. Kavita highlights the importance of an 'assumed breach' mindset and introduces the concept of a 'minimum viable business' framework to prioritize critical services. The discussion turns to identity-driven threats, where Kavita cites research showing 90% of attacks have an identity component, emphasizing the need to treat identity as tier zero infrastructure. She details non-human identities like service accounts and API tokens as growing risks. Regulation is addressed, with Kavita mentioning frameworks like Malaysia's Cybersecurity Act, Singapore's MAS guidelines, and EU standards for financial institutions. She advocates for board-level resilience attestation and mandatory restoration tests. After a break, Kavita outlines common gaps in cyber recovery, such as missing identity plans, the fallacy that backups equal recoverability, manual runbooks, and unrealistic targets. She provides a positive example of an Australian port operator that recovered from a cyber incident in three days by phasing restoration. The conversation explores converging identity, data, and recovery, noting benefits like faster blast radius scoping but limitations like concentration risk and cost. Kavita advises executives to overcome perceived complexity by running demos that restore real services. She encourages transparency through culture, blameless reviews, and quarterly drills. Finally, Kavita argues that business leaders must evolve from sponsors to owners of cyber recovery, integrating it into organizational strategy as a business risk.

As heard by us

Cyber recovery is recast as a boardroom issue, with resilience, regulation, and continuity taking center stage.

Tech Talk presents cyber recovery as a leadership problem, with Rich Bradbury and Kavita Mariapan steering the conversation from prevention to what happens after attackers break through.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

When cyber recovery becomes leadership's job, the boardroom gets the trouble call.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Tech Talk