Building Security for a World That’s Already Changed

There’s a question I’ve been sitting with lately: Are we prepared for what AI is about to expose in our organizations—not just technically, but operationally? In this episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I sit down with Kavitha Mariappan, Rubrik’s Chief Transformation Officer, to unpack some of the less flashy but arguably more urgent questions about enterprise security, AI readiness, and business continuity. If your organization is still treating identity as a login issue or AI as a future-state conversation, you might be missing the bigger picture. Kavitha doesn’t speak in clichés. She’s been in the trenches—engineering, scaling go-to-market teams, and now helping steer one of the fastest-evolving players in the data security space. Her perspective is shaped by decades of experience, but her focus is very much on the now: how to operationalize resilience at a time when every system, process, and even person has become a potential attack vector. One of the threads we pull on is the idea that resilience isn’t a fallback plan anymore—it’s the front line. And identity? That’s not just a security issue. It’s a dependency. If you can’t log in, you can’t recover. You can’t operate. You can’t pivot. The conversation touches on what it really means to build for resilience in a landscape where downtime isn’t just costly—it’s existential. We also explore what I’ll loosely call “AI exposure therapy”—not in the sense of experimenting with new models or shiny tools, but in understanding how AI is forcing companies to confront their structural weaknesses. What used to be considered internal inefficiencies are now potential vectors of attack. Technical debt isn’t just a performance issue—it’s a risk multiplier. Kavitha brings data to the table too—sharing insight from Rubrik Zero Labs on the alarming surge in identity-based attacks and why the majority of companies are still playing catch-up when it comes to securing what they can’t always see. It’s a wake-up call, but not a hopeless one. What made this conversation stand out to me wasn’t just the subject matter, but the way Kavitha frames the questions we should be asking: How do we architect for a world that’s already in flux? How do we define AI transformation when most businesses are still digesting digital transformation? And perhaps most critically, what needs to change inside the organization before the tech can even do its job? I won’t give away the full arc of the discussion, but here’s my pitch: If you’re leading, advising, or building for a company that handles sensitive data (hint: that’s all of us), this episode will challenge you to think differently about where resilience really begins—and what it’s going to take to build it into the DNA of your org. Listen to or watch the full episode here: