Modernizing Security and Resilience for AI Threats

In today’s digital-first world, an organization’s success now depends heavily on how they are implementing AI across workflows to grow revenue, customer relationships, and drive productivity. As organizations race to embed AI tools across their operations, it can be easy for IT teams to overlook certain priorities as they solely focus on accelerating adoption to not fall behind the competition. If adoption outpaces oversight, it can leave blind spots for attackers to gain access to critical data. Not only can attackers steal access to intellectual property and customer proprietary data, but they can also dramatically disrupt business operations.

With cloud and IT infrastructure now becoming key targets for hackers, IT leaders need to take a stronger approach to protecting their organization’s most critical asset, data. Yet, 63% of organizations lack AI governance policies to manage AI or prevent the increase of shadow AI, according to a recent IBM survey. This is likely due to an organization’s lack of oversight in its AI adoption strategy. Attackers are recognizing this pattern and are taking advantage of those who aren’t prioritizing security and modernization. In fact, IBM found an alarming 97% of AI-related security breaches involved AI systems that lacked proper access controls.

Data breaches happen without warning and can be over in seconds. Following a breach, the impacts can last for months or even years, disrupting operations such as sales, customer service, production and much more. With so much at risk, organizations must make modernization a core priority in their AI journey to securely protect mission-critical systems, workloads, and data.

The Expanding Risk of Data Breaches in the Age of AI

As cyberattacks become more sophisticated and targeted with the help of AI, the average breach costs in the U.S. set a record high this past year at $10 million, driven by higher regulatory fines and detection and escalation costs. From healthcare to transportation, many industries still rely on outdated infrastructures built for a different era that don’t meet evolving security and compliance standards. As these systems continue to age, they become a growing liability as they welcome greater risk to mission-critical systems.

For more than a decade, healthcare has been the most expensive industry for data breaches. For attackers, there is a vast amount of patient data that can be stolen and used for identity theft, insurance fraud, and other crimes. For the healthcare industry, it takes an average of 279 days to identify and contain a breach, which is five weeks longer than the industry average, according to IBM.

In just the past few months, we have seen global airlines confirm that they experienced data breaches that disrupted their operations and exposed data of millions of customers. In 2024, a ransomware attack on a U.S. airport shut down critical functions for days. These events often result in downtime, leading to frustration from customers. With today’s air travel so deeply interconnected across digital systems like crew scheduling, maintenance, and air traffic communication, a minor breach can cause major disruptions, exposing just how vulnerable these operations are to modern-day attackers, underscoring the risks of neglecting modernization.

Delaying Modernization Is a Risk Too Big to Take

Like many digital transformation projects, the decision to modernize isn’t made in isolation. It requires methodical planning and alignment across an organization with a committee of stakeholders all weighing in with their own concerns and priorities. Yet, the idea of modernization often sparks hesitation among leaders. It has a misconception of being expensive, disruptive, and risky. If this were all true, it can be easy to understand the hesitation.

Part of the challenge of getting every leader on board can be better understood by looking through the lens of how modernization will impact them the most. For IT leaders, there may be concerns about the complexity and the risks of downtime and data loss. Operational leaders typically think of the impacts it will have on staffing demands and disruptions to business continuity. And it’s easy for security and compliance leaders to be worried about meeting regulatory standards without exposing the company’s data to new attacks. Most importantly, executive leadership can tend to be hesitant due to concerns around the total investment costs and disruption to innovation and revenue growth. While each leader may have their valid concerns, the risk of inaction is much greater.

With AI helping cyberattacks become more frequent, complex, and costly, organizations that don’t prioritize modernizing their IT operations may be putting their organization’s data in the trust of outdated systems that weren’t designed to defend against modern-day attacks.

Fortunately, modernization doesn’t mean you need to take on a massive overhaul of your organization’s operations. Modernizing in place is an alternative solution that can be a sustainable, incremental strategy that improves stability, security, and performance without putting mission-critical systems at risk. When leaders can align on business continuity needs and concerns, they can develop low-risk approaches that still move operations forward while achieving long-term organizational goals.

How Prioritizing Modernization Drives Value

For organizations that prioritize and invest in modernization, it has been proven it can drive stronger results and benefits across security, resilience, and efficiency. A recent study by IDC found that organizations with the highest levels of IT modernization maturity typically experience twice the levels of improvement compared to the least mature organizations.

Leading organizations recognize that ensuring data protection, preventing unauthorized access, and maintaining operational resilience, compliance, and auditability are all critical components of the modernization journey. In fact, the IDC study found that 86% of companies with high modernization maturity are prioritizing governance and compliance to make data protection consistent across the enterprise. Additionally, many are turning to automation to reduce manual errors and improve reliability, with 77% citing it as a key part of their cybersecurity strategy. Other areas they’re focused on include advanced encryption, zero-trust access controls, and multifactor authentication.

It’s clear that the most forward-looking organizations understand what it takes to prevent and mitigate attacks. To develop strong and effective security, it depends on modernizing systems and ensuring that leaders, processes, and technology all work together to defend against evolving threats.

A Smarter Path to Modernization 

It may be assumed that organizations need to complete a full-scale modernization overhaul. While this may be necessary for some organizations, it’s not the only solution. Modernization offers an alternative to rip-and-replace strategies that can be tailored to an organization’s unique needs and constraints, such as timing, compliance needs, budget, and risk tolerance.

Many organizations take a phased and adaptive approach, which lets teams modernize in manageable steps, reducing disruption while still delivering measurable improvements. For any organization, they should prioritize strategic plans that best align with their goals. While these strategies may vary from organization to organization based on needs, these are some of the common paths taken:

• Unifying on-prem and cloud systems for a hybrid cloud approach to simplify oversight and management
• Relocating specific workloads to the cloud while maintaining sensitive or performance-critical ones on-prem
• Updating key mainframe applications to run in private or public cloud environments for improved flexibility and scalability
• Enhancing the mainframe’s capabilities to support cloud-native applications and AI workloads securely in a private cloud
• Upgrading specific components based on immediate needs and available resources
• Migrating non-essential or resource-intensive applications to the public cloud to reduce mainframe load while boosting agility

By implementing a hybrid modernization-in-place strategy, organizations can achieve greater resilience for mission-critical systems against breach risks, meet compliance and regulations, and unlock AI innovation at scale without sacrificing security or trust.

From Risk to Resilience with Modernization

A modernization journey can take many forms. From updates to your on-prem system or migrating to a hybrid-cloud environment, modernization is a strategic initiative that can improve and bolster your company’s strength against potential data breaches.

While modernization can be a complex journey, working with experienced IT partners can provide your team with technical expertise and deep understanding of risks and blind spots for AI adoption. By working with the right partners, modernization can be less disruptive and strategic. Organizations should prioritize partners that can ensure every step of the journey is designed to meet your specific goals and objectives – without disruption to business continuity.

Regardless of the modernization path you choose, it is a commitment to improving where your organization stands today toward a resilient future built for growth, security, and innovation.