Cyber Resilience vs. Data Resilience: Why Backups Alone Won’t Save You

Francis Rose speaks with Marlin McFate, Public Sector CTO and CISO at Cohesity, about the evolving definition of cyber resilience. McFate explains why it’s critical to distinguish between data resiliency—long focused on recovering from natural disasters—and cyber resiliency, which accounts for persistent adversaries, loss of trust in systems, and the risk of reinfection after an attack. He shares Cohesity’s cyber resiliency model, including the foundational step of ensuring backups survive and remain trustworthy, so they can anchor investigation, forensics, and recovery efforts.McFate also discusses how agencies can prepare recovery environments, rebuild authentication services like Active Directory, and reduce downtime with minimal data loss. Finally, he connects resilience to data value: Cohesity’s unique approach to indexing structured and unstructured data enables agencies to safely use AI and retrieval-augmented generation for discovery, compliance, and mission-driven insights.Subscribe and listen to the Fed Gov Today Podcast anytime on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at FedGovToday.com.