Cybersecurity Awareness Month, observed every October, brings renewed attention to the risks that accompany an increasingly connected digital economy. For Indian as well as global enterprises, the occasion comes as artificial intelligence, cloud services and digital platforms become more deeply embedded in business operations, creating new opportunities alongside challenges in protecting data, systems and customer trust.
The growing use of AI agents adds another dimension to the security landscape. As these systems gain access to enterprise data and undertake tasks across applications, organisations must consider how permissions are assigned, how actions are monitored and where human oversight is needed. The risks are not limited to external attacks; excessive access and unintended actions can also expose businesses to harm.
At the same time, detecting a threat is only one part of the challenge. Enterprises must be prepared to assess the extent of a compromise, protect identities and restore critical services from trusted recovery points. These considerations place cyber resilience alongside prevention as a business priority.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month also serves as a reminder that technology alone cannot address every risk. Strong security practices depend on governance, employee awareness and accountability across the organisation, supported by regular reviews as technologies and threats evolve.
Against this backdrop, industry leaders share their perspectives on the changing cybersecurity landscape, the importance of security fundamentals and the steps organisations can take to strengthen preparedness and sustain trust in an AI-driven digital economy.
Three Myths Indian Enterprises Must Rethink in the Age of AI
Balaji Rao, Area Vice President, India & SAARC, Commvault
“India’s AI ambitions are accelerating, but so is the complexity of securing an increasingly digital economy. As enterprises deploy AI agents across business systems, traditional security assumptions are being tested. With CERT-In reporting over 29.44 lakh cyber incidents in India in 2025, organizations must rethink not just how they prevent attacks, but how they manage risk when AI acts at machine speed.
Myth 1: AI risk starts and ends with malicious actors. AI agents can access sensitive data, operate with delegated identities and take actions autonomously. Excessive permissions, unmanaged access and unintended actions can create exposure even without an external attacker. Enterprises must know what their AI can access, what it can change and where risks are emerging.
Myth 2: Detecting threats means we are in control. Detection is only the beginning. Threats can remain hidden in protected data, while compromised identities can give attackers continued access. Organizations need to uncover hidden threats, understand the extent of compromise and establish what can still be trusted.
Myth 3: If we can restore, we can recover. Restoring data does not guarantee safe operations. Enterprises must identify clean recovery points, re-establish trusted identities and restore critical applications in the right order. Otherwise, recovery can reintroduce threats rather than eliminate them.
This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Indian enterprises must move beyond assuming they are protected to proving they are prepared. Know what your AI can access. Know what your security tools may have missed. And know you can recover cleanly when prevention fails. In the age of AI, security is not just about stopping threats. It is about keeping business running when they get through.”
Agentic AI Adoption Calls for Stronger Security, Guardrails and Accountability
Raja Lakshmipathy, Vice President and Managing Director – India & SAARC, Genesys
“As Indian organisations move from AI experimentation to deploying agentic AI across customer experiences, security, privacy and governance will need to remain central to that journey and need to evolve alongside it. AI agents are increasingly able to reason, taking on more complex tasks and interacting with enterprise systems, making it important to establish clear boundaries around access, decision-making and accountability.
This is where agentic orchestration can play an important role - to bring AI, people, data and systems together as part of a connected customer experience. To do so, the focus needs to be on creating a human and AI partnership where technology can act with the right context, while humans continue to guide, supervise and step in when their judgement or expertise is required. This requires clear permissions for technology teams, appropriate guardrails and a shared understanding across the organisation of how AI should be used. With AI capabilities developing rapidly, governance should not be a one-time exercise. Security and governance practices will need to be continually reviewed as organisations expand their use cases.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month provides an opportunity to reinforce the importance of these measures and a timely reminder that responsible AI innovation and customer trust need to go hand in hand.”
Securing India’s Digital Future Through Shared Responsibility
Sunil Sharma, Managing Director & VP – Sales (India & SAARC), Sophos
“India’s digital transformation is creating unprecedented opportunities for businesses of all sizes. From digital payments and AI-driven innovation to cloud adoption and connected ecosystems, organizations today are embracing technology to drive growth, improve customer experiences, and stay competitive. As this journey accelerates, cybersecurity is no longer just an IT consideration. It has become a critical business priority that underpins trust, resilience, and long-term success. The conversation around cybersecurity is also evolving at the leadership level. Regulatory developments such as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act have reinforced the importance of responsible data stewardship, while growing digital dependencies have made cyber resilience an essential component of business strategy.
This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, companies should view cybersecurity as a shared responsibility that extends across the organization. Building a culture of awareness, accountability, and preparedness is just as important as investing in technology. The organizations that embed security into their growth agenda today will be best positioned to earn stakeholder trust, adapt to change, and thrive in an increasingly digital economy.”
AI Agents Need the Same Security Discipline as Employees
Vaibhav Tare, Chief Information Security Officer, Fulcrum Digital
“This year's Cybersecurity Awareness Month theme, Stay Safe Online, is often read as a consumer message, but enterprises can't afford to treat it that way. As AI agents take on more of the day-to-day work inside organizations, from processing documents to executing transactions, every one of those agents needs the same basic hygiene we ask of employees: strong identity controls, least-privilege access and continuous monitoring of what they're allowed to do. Attackers rarely need to break through a firewall if they can walk in through an unmonitored agent or a reused credential. The organizations that stay resilient won't necessarily be the ones with the newest security tools, they'll be the ones that got the fundamentals right for both their people and their AI systems. At Fulcrum Digital, we build that discipline into how we design AI systems from day one, because prevention is still far cheaper than recovery."
AI can help organizations spot vulnerabilities as well as make deception more convincing
Priti Sawant, Founder & CEO, JoulesToWatts
“As organisations become more AI-driven, the question is no longer simply how to protect the systems they use. It is how to help people make safer decisions at the speed those systems now operate. AI can help organisations spot vulnerabilities, but it can also make deception more convincing and threats harder to recognise. That means security must be built into the ordinary moments of work: the file someone shares, the request they choose to question and the data they trust a tool to handle. Technology can raise the alarm; people still need to know when to pause.
As India’s data protection framework sharpens expectations around personal information, privacy and security must move from policy documents into daily practice. Clear accountability, sound governance and thoughtful use of data need to work together across the organisation. Cybersecurity is not a wall around the business; it is a habit shared across it. The strongest defence may be a person who notices that something feels unusual and feels empowered to speak up before a small lapse becomes a breach.”
AI changing the nature of enterprise risk
Vinod V Jayaprakash, Consulting Cybersecurity Leader, EY Global Delivery Services
“AI is not just creating new cyber-threats; it is changing the very nature of enterprise risk. While traditional threat prevention remains essential, it was not designed for an environment where AI is increasingly embedded across data, applications, and cloud infrastructure. Organizations, therefore, need to rethink security architecture around adaptability and resilience, protecting critical assets while preparing to respond and recover when prevention is not enough.
Cybersecurity investment must evolve too, with greater focus on identity, data, AI security and continuous exposure management rather than simply adding more controls. Ultimately, the organizations that embed security into their AI journey will be better positioned to innovate at speed without allowing cyber-risk to scale alongside it.”
Security needs to account for how AI accesses, interprets, and acts on data
Pankaj Goel, Chief Technology Officer, LeadSquared
“As AI becomes embedded across enterprise applications, cybersecurity has to account for how AI systems access, interpret and act on data, not just how that data is stored. This is especially true in CRM environments, where AI is moving from making recommendations to taking defined actions across customer journeys.
That shift raises the bar on three things. Explainability, an enterprise must be able to reconstruct why an AI system took a particular action, not simply observe that it did. Decision transparency, clear visibility into what a system can access, what it is permitted to do, and at what point human judgment re-enters the process. And privacy by design, AI that operates on live customer data has to be compliant with how that data was permitted to be used in the first place, not retrofitted for compliance afterwards.”
Embedding security across the technology stack becoming indispensable
Venkat Sitaram, Senior Director and Country Head, Infrastructure Solutions Group, India, Dell Technologies
“The next phase of AI adoption will be defined not just by what organisations can do with AI, but by how confidently they can deploy it at scale. Dell Technologies’ Modern Enterprise Readiness Study 2026, conducted by Vanson Bourne, found that 61% of Indian organisations say security and compliance concerns have slowed or paused AI adoption. This underscores a fundamental imperative: trust must be built into the AI ecosystem from the outset, not addressed after deployment.
As organisations move towards frontier models and agentic AI, security must be embedded across the technology stack, from endpoints and data pipelines to infrastructure and model environments. Safeguarding model integrity, securing data flows and enforcing zero-trust access are critical to protecting sensitive information and ensuring AI systems operate within defined policies.
The opportunity lies in making security an enabler of innovation, rather than a constraint on it. With 95% of organisations recognising that a trusted technology partner can help reduce adoption risks and accelerate measurable outcomes, the path to scaling AI lies in modernising infrastructure and security in tandem. This is how businesses can move from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment with greater confidence, resilience and accountability.”
The strongest cyber-defence combines machine speed with human judgement
Sandhya Arun, Chief Technology Officer at Wipro Limited
“This theme of this year's Cybersecurity Awareness Month, "Don't Make It Easy for Them," is not just a call for greater awareness, but a call to build consistent, day-to-day habits that make life difficult for cyber-criminals. This applies to both individuals in their personal lives and to organisations.
As AI becomes more widely adopted, attackers and defenders alike are gaining access to new capabilities. AI-enabled techniques can automate reconnaissance, generate convincing content, and increase the scale at which cyber-operations are conducted. For organisations, this raises the imperative to strengthen detection and response, reducing the time between identifying a threat and acting on it.
At the same time, no one can safely assume that every attack can be prevented. AI will strengthen cyber defence, but it will not make organisations breach-proof. "Don't Make It Easy for Them" therefore requires organisation-wide systems to focus on both prevention and resilience. The defining capability is cyber agility: the ability to detect compromise early, contain its spread, recover quickly, and adapt from the event.
The strongest cyber defence combines machine speed with human judgement. Organisations need clear policies that define the role of automation, establish decision rights, and preserve accountability. Cyber awareness must be embedded into the organisational operating model, linking workforce behaviour, technology, and response. Ultimately, cyber agility is not just a security objective; it is an organisational responsibility spanning architecture, operating models, and governance.”
Sovereignty gap presents a significant cybersecurity challenge
Vishal Sirohi, Founder and CEO, Island Computing
“As AI becomes integral to critical services such as banking, healthcare, governance and defence, the infrastructure powering it is no longer just an IT concern—it is a matter of national security. The models, data and decisions shaping these services must be protected against breaches, disruptions and vulnerabilities arising from systems beyond an organisation’s control. Yet many Indian organisations continue to run critical AI workloads on infrastructure they neither fully control nor have complete visibility into. This is the sovereignty gap, and it presents a significant cybersecurity challenge.
At Island Computing, we recognised this challenge and built our own compute, control plane, orchestration, and identity systems, operating them entirely in India. This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we want to emphasise that the future of AI demands sovereign infrastructure, accountability, and uncompromising security at every layer. Whoever controls the infrastructure controls the risk therefore for India to realise its AI ambitions, digital sovereignty must be embedded in the foundation, making it a fundamental pillar of cybersecurity and a prerequisite for India to build a robust AI ecosystem.”
Customer data must stay out of frontier model training and stay isolated
Vishal Sharai, Chief Technology Officer, CambrianEdge.ai
“Never in the history of cybersecurity has the ground shifted this far, this fast. Attacks used to be tools in skilled hands. Today they arrive as swarms: coordinated with purpose, and made of agents that can think for themselves. AI agents sent out on routine research have already breached a government portal without a single human instruction, and the full picture emerged only months later. The barrier to entry has collapsed. An undefended front no longer needs an expert to breach it. It needs only someone willing to ask. AI has added a great many doors, and the swarm will try everyone. For Indian enterprises scaling AI under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, keeping them shut begins with governance.
Customer data must stay out of frontier model training, stay isolated from every other customer, and stay protected by contracts that bind every model provider in the chain. Any agent that can act is untrusted until proven otherwise. Every output must be traceable to how it was produced. And every consequential AI decision needs a clear point where a person can review, approve, or override it. Trust added later tends to arrive shortly after the breach. The enterprises that lead will pair strong controls with a workforce fluent enough in AI to know when something looks wrong.”
Strengthening cyber-resilience through data integrity, provenance and trust
Sanjay Agrawal, Head Presales and CTO, India and SAARC, Hitachi Vantara
“India’s enterprises are rapidly adopting AI, cloud and data-intensive technologies, but this is also expanding the surface that organisations need to protect. As AI enables attackers to identify vulnerabilities and act at greater speed, cybersecurity can no longer be viewed only as a matter of preventing an attack. Organisations also need to be prepared for what happens when defences are breached.
This makes cyber-resilience increasingly important. It starts with knowing where critical data resides, who has access to it, how it is being used and whether it can be trusted. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in business operations, protecting the integrity and provenance of the data powering these systems will be just as important as protecting the systems themselves.
For Indian businesses, the priority should therefore be to build resilience into the data infrastructure from the outset, with strong governance, continuous monitoring and clean, recoverable copies of critical data. The ultimate measure of cybersecurity is not simply whether an organisation can stop an attack, but whether it can recover trusted data, restore operations and maintain business continuity when disruption occurs.”
