AI Failure Exposes Critical Need for Operational Resilience

Enterprises deploying AI at scale are learning a hard truth: the greatest threat isn’t the technology-it’s the risk of failure without resilience.

At RSAC 2026, Commvault executives Vidya Shankaran and Anna Griffin stressed that operational resilience must evolve from a reactive plan into a continuous discipline. "If that entire AI stack is inaccessible to the business, what does that mean for the business?" Shankaran asked, urging protection of every layer-from source data to vector databases.

Commvault’s ResOps framework reimagines cyber resilience as an ongoing cycle, not a one-time fix. "You take backups that had traditionally been static and you make them very active," Griffin explained, emphasizing real-time data classification, access control, and threat scanning.

Both leaders warned that siloed teams undermine resilience. Cyber readiness must be a business-wide priority, embedded through constant testing to build "muscle memory" for incident response. "It’s a living and breathing strategy," Shankaran said. "It doesn’t stop just because you finished something yesterday."