We’re excited to bring you insights from Boomchi Kumar, a cyber resiliency veteran with over 20 years in services and infrastructure support based in Irvine, California. Boomchi has built and led Data Protection and Cyber Resiliency practices from the ground up, partnering with Gartner-recognized experts to deploy air-gapped backups, isolated recovery environments, and business-aligned RTO and RPO frameworks in industries like finance and healthcare.
In this interview, we’ll dig into Boomchi’s definition of cyber resiliency, explore the key steps organizations must take to prepare for and recover from cyber events, uncover the metrics that truly measure resilience, and discuss how emerging technologies like AI-driven threat detection are reshaping recovery strategies. Let’s dive in.
How do you define cyber resiliency, and how does it differ from a traditional reactive security posture?
Cyber resilience is the framework that helps an organization spot threats, stand firm during events like ransomware attacks or system failures, and bounce back fast so operations continue and data stays safe. It is not about stopping every breach but about keeping your business running and restoring full strength as soon as a cyber event strikes.
What key steps must organizations in finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure take to build a resilient security framework?
Building true cyber resilience means thinking beyond point solutions. To succeed, organizations in finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure must adopt a big-picture approach, starting with these essential moves:
Conduct a through Risk Assessment
- Identify your organization’s critical assets and potential vulnerabilities.
- Analyze potential threats and their potential impact on your business.
- Understand Minimal Viable Company like minimal viable bank or minimum viable hospital.
- Identify the Cyber Recovery RTO along with Disaster Recovery RTO
Data Immutability and Air-Gapped Backups
- Employ immutable, air-gapped, or logically segmented backups so that clean copies of the data are readily accessible to recover from ransomware or insider attacks.
Combine Threat Intelligence and Anomaly Detection
- Leverage advanced analytics and AI to detect early signs of compromise, fraud, or operational risk.
- Integate your Cyber recovery tool with existing XDR, MDR,SIEM and SOAR tools , most to the modern cyber recovery tools have integrations, this will reduce false alarms and provide security teams a single source of information.
Automate Incident Response and Test Recovery Processes
- Develop a stone incident response plan, with different scenarios
- Conduct simulated cyber-attacks (Penetration Testing) to identify weaknesses.
- Create orchestrated and Automated recovery workflows.
- Assemble a Cross-Functional Crisis Response Team. Gather IT, security, compliance, legal, and business leaders to align an effective response and communication.
Which metrics best demonstrate an enterprise’s ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from a cyber event?
Tracking the right numbers shows how well your organization can prepare for a cyber event, cope during one, and bounce back afterward. The most telling measures belong to three areas of cyber resilience: preparedness, response and recovery. Below are the top metrics to monitor::
- Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) & Respond (MTTR): Tracks how fast threats are discovered and contained.
- Cyber Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Tracks how fast critical systems and data can be fully restored following an incident.
- Backup Immutability & RPO Compliance: Ensures recovery points are secure, current, and in line with business continuity goals.
- System Uptime During Attacks: Indicates the organization’s capacity to sustain operations while under attack.
- Employee Resilience & Network Segmentation: Quantifies human preparedness and effectiveness in limiting threat spread.
How can security teams shift their mindset and culture from blocking every threat to planning for rapid recovery when breaches occur?
Start by assuming a breach is inevitable, then lean into frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and MITRE ATT&CK, which say detect first, contain next, and recover fast. In practice, that means zero trust architecture, strict network segmentation, locking down access so every user and device only has exactly what they need, and nothing more, to stop attackers from roaming freely.
Next, think of your backups and recovery environment as your safety net. Keep your backups immutable and air gapped, and run restores in an isolated clean room so you know you can bring systems back without carrying over any infection. Automate your recovery processes, test them regularly, and tie them directly to the recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives your business cares about. When SecOps works side by side with your infrastructure and data protection teams, you get verified restores, fewer repeat infections, and far less downtime.
By making these changes, you turn cybersecurity into a true business enabler, not a roadblock, giving your organization the confidence to keep moving forward even when advanced attacks hit.
What role do emerging technologies like AI-driven threat detection and automated response play in enabling cyber resiliency?
Automated incident response and threat detection powered by AI are vital capabilities associated with modern cyber resiliency. A traditional security infrastructure employs various tools that depend on static signatures and manual threat hunting, which is bound to fall short of today’s sophisticated and rapidly evolving threats. Organizations are now able to identify new attack vectors and insider threats using AI and machine learning, which facilitate real-time behavioral analytics, anomaly detection, and predictive insights.
Such technologies, when utilized with automated response systems, significantly reduce MTTD and MTTR. For example, the automated execution of backup snapshot triggering, compromised endpoint isolation, or clean room recovery initiation can be carried out instantaneously and orchestrated without human intervention. The automation highlights not only the acceleration of containment but also the increased consistency and reduced human error during stressful scenarios.
In addition to these automated methods, AI-powered tools further augment situational awareness through data correlation from diverse endpoints and cloud networks, allowing security operations teams to prioritize significant threats while optimizing resource allocation. The bottom line is that the redirection enabled by AI and automation transforms the security model from proactive to adaptive resilience, equipping organizations to absorb attacks while enabling them to recover operations in real time.
How should enterprises balance investments in prevention, detection, and recovery to ensure a holistic security strategy?
To build a truly resilient security strategy, organizations must balance investment across three co-dependent pillars:
• Prevention: Baseline controls like Zero Trust and MFA reduce attack surfaces but can’t stop all threats.
• Detection & Response: Tools like XDR, SOAR, and threat intelligence decrease dwell time and lessen impact.
• Recovery: Long overlooked, recovery is now a top priority, requiring immutable backups, clean-room restores, and business-driven RTO/RPOs.
Strategic Recommendation:
Shift from a prevention-biased approach to a resilience-first position, using frameworks like NIST CSF 2.0 to guide balanced investment. Recovery must be a board-level imperative, not just an IT responsibility.
How have you personally contributed to advancing cyber resiliency within enterprises?
I’ve spent my career evolving strategies from reactive defenses to proactive resilience. At Trace3, I built the Data Protection and Cyber Resiliency Practice from the ground up, leading enterprise-wide programs to deploy isolated recovery environments, design immutable backup solutions, and put in place business-aligned RPO and RTO frameworks that keep systems running even when ransomware or other disruptions hit.
I’ve partnered closely with Gartner-recognized cyber recovery experts, advising on solution architecture, integrations, and real-world recovery validation. I always map our work back to NIST CSF and MITRE ATT&CK in industries like finance and healthcare. Beyond hands-on implementation, I guide executive teams and boards on resilience-first approaches that prioritize rapid recovery, data integrity, and sustainable operations.
In short, I help organizations assume breaches are inevitable, prepare for them, and bounce back fast with confidence.
Beyond implementation, I’ve contributed as an advisor and thought leader, guiding executive teams and board-level stakeholders on building resilience-first strategies prioritizing rapid recovery, data integrity, and long-term operational sustainability.
What challenges and opportunities do you see for cyber resiliency over the next five years?
Cyber resilience will face a double challenge over the next five years: rising threat sophistication and increasing architectural complexities. Threat actors are racing to weaponize AI to automate attacks, develop evasive malware, and attack supply chain vulnerabilities. At the same time, companies are accelerating digital transformation, adopting hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, edge computing, and API-based environments, which expand the attack surface and confuse recovery paths.
Opportunities lie in rethinking resiliency as a continuous, data-driven discipline, not just a technical failsafe. We’ll see the convergence of cybersecurity, infrastructure, and business continuity teams into unified cyber resiliency units. Emerging technologies like AI-driven threat prediction, autonomous recovery orchestration, and cyber recovery-as-a-service (CRaaS) will mature to enable real-time detection and automated, policy-driven recovery.
Frameworks like NIST CSF 2.0 and MITRE ATT&CK will become more prescriptive blueprints, especially in highly regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. Regulatory demands for recoverability and business continuity operations will increase, increasing compliance pressure and strategic opportunity.
Above all, the most resilient organizations will treat recovery as a board-level initiative, automated, measurable, and continuously tested, rather than as a one-off, one-timer disaster playbook.
