From backup to business resilience: Inside Cognizant and Rubrik’s new BRaaS model

Ransomware, infrastructure outages, supply chain disruptions, and the rapid operationalization of AI have fundamentally changed what business resilience means. For CIOs, keeping the lights on is no longer enough.

Today’s mandate is to ensure the business can withstand disruption and recover fast enough to avoid cascading operational, financial, and reputational damage.

That reality has exposed the limits of traditional backup and recovery.

Legacy backup was designed for a different threat model. It protected against accidental deletion, hardware failure, or natural disasters. Modern cyberattacks are intentional and strategic. Ransomware now targets backup systems directly, along with hypervisors, cloud workloads, and identity infrastructure, with the explicit goal of eliminating recovery options.

At the same time, business tolerance for downtime has collapsed. Multi-day recovery windows may have been acceptable in the past, but they are no longer viable in always-on digital environments.

This shift has introduced a new benchmark for IT leaders: cyber recovery time objectives. Organizations must be able to restore clean, trusted operations quickly and at scale, even when attackers assume backups are part of the target surface.

Recent high-profile incidents like the ransomware attacks that impacted a large auto manufacturer and a retail organization illustrate how a single incident can ripple across partners, operations, and customers. These attacks make one thing clear: the cloud trust surface is attackable, and resilience strategies must assume compromise rather than hope to avoid it.

At the same time, enterprise environments have become far more complex. Hybrid cloud, SaaS platforms, APIs, microservices, edge systems, and now AI agents have created a dynamic infrastructure fabric that changes faster than traditional continuity plans were ever designed to handle. True resilience now depends on restoring data, services, integrations, identity pathways, governance states, and increasingly, AI context and behavior.

Why CIOs are rethinking resilience models

This is where business resilience as a service (BRaaS) comes into play.

The BRaaS offering from Cognizant and Rubrik combines Rubrik’s cyber resilience platform with Cognizant’s domain expertise and global delivery capabilities to deliver a service-driven approach to resilience.

Rather than managing fragmented tools across environments, BRaaS standardizes data protection, configuration validation, and resilience monitoring across on-premises systems, cloud environments, SaaS applications, identity layers, and emerging AI workloads. This unified model reduces blind spots and provides a single view of resilience posture.

When incidents occur, BRaaS supports faster, more confident recovery through pre-validated, malware-free recovery points, orchestrated recovery workflows and runbooks, and expert support during crises. The result is reduced downtime and significantly improved cyber recovery time objectives.

For CIOs, the business outcomes are clear. BRaaS delivers more predictable, operational expense-aligned economics through a scalable, as-a-service model. It accelerates time to business continuity by standardizing and industrializing recovery processes. It reduces financial and reputational risk while improving compliance and audit readiness.

Looking ahead, resilience strategies will continue to shift toward AI-driven recovery, stronger identity controls, and greater board-level accountability. Resilience will also become more tightly integrated into day-to-day operations, connecting with IT service management, security operations, financial governance, and platform engineering.

For CIOs, the focus is moving away from isolated recovery plans and toward building resilience directly into how the business operates.

Learn more about how Cognizant and Rubrik are helping organizations strengthen business resilience across hybrid environments. If you would like further details or have specific questions, send an email to: BusinessResilience@cognizant.com