Modern enterprises rely on digital infrastructure that never sleeps. But as systems become more connected and complex, they also become more exposed. Ransomware, cloud outages, and supply chain breaches have made one thing clear: resilience, not just speed, defines the strength of modern IT.
Ankit Verma, an infrastructure and cybersecurity leader with more than fifteen years of experience, has helped organizations across healthcare, fintech, and government build systems that can withstand disruption. He says traditional infrastructure, designed mainly for uptime, must now evolve for survival.
“The world has shifted from centralized control to distributed dependency,” Verma said. “You can’t protect what you can’t see, and you can’t recover what you didn’t design to fail safely.”
He identifies three changes that define the next stage of resilient infrastructure.
Build resilience into design, not after deployment
Verma believes resilience should be engineered from the start rather than added later. “We’ve moved past the idea of stopping every attack. The goal now is to take a hit and recover fast,” he said. This means creating redundancy across data centers, automating failover in the cloud, and keeping immutable backups that ransomware can’t touch.
He also stresses practice. “If your backup works but your recovery plan doesn’t, you’ve already lost half the battle,” he added.
Secure the cloud without losing control
Cloud adoption has changed how companies scale, but it also brings new risks. “The shared responsibility model confuses a lot of teams,” Verma said. “They think the cloud provider protects everything, but the provider only covers part of the stack.”
He recommends creating “cloud resilience zones” with built-in encryption, identity verification, and monitoring. “Security shouldn’t slow people down,” he said. “It should be part of how things are built.”
Verma’s own experience leading Zero Trust projects supports this idea. “We replaced VPNs with identity-based access, which cut our attack surface by more than half,” he said. “Trust has to follow the user, not the device.”
Treat supply chain security as part of core infrastructure
Attacks on vendors and third-party software have shown how fragile digital ecosystems can be. Verma says that managing third-party risk must sit inside infrastructure planning, not as a side function of compliance.
“You’re only as strong as the code you inherit,” he said. “Every library, every integration, every vendor is a potential doorway.” His teams build verification pipelines that continuously scan dependencies and track the source of every software component. “We need the software version of a bill of materials,” he said. “Otherwise we’re flying blind.”
Looking ahead
For Verma, the future of resilient infrastructure means merging security, engineering, and continuity into one discipline. “You can’t separate infrastructure from cybersecurity anymore,” he said. “It’s one ecosystem that needs to work together.”
He believes the focus will shift from uptime to integrity-making sure systems behave as expected even under stress. “Outages will happen,” he said. “What matters is how fast you can restore trust.”
Verma’s view is simple: resilience is not something you buy, it’s something you build. The companies that understand that now will be the ones that stay online when the next major disruption arrives.
