Cloud Security Alliance launches AI resilience centre

The Cloud Security Alliance has launched an AI Resilience Centre of Excellence, with Rubrik as its founding partner. The initiative sits within the CSAI Foundation and is aimed at government and enterprise organisations.

The centre will focus on governance, operational resilience, and recovery for AI systems, particularly as AI agents and autonomous workflows become more common in business and public sector operations. Designed as a vendor-neutral effort, it will produce reference architectures, executive tabletop exercises, governance guidance, maturity models, and operational metrics.

The launch comes as security and technology leaders face growing questions about how to prepare for AI failures as well as prevent them. The project is intended to help enterprises and public bodies protect, monitor, contain, and recover data and systems affected by AI-related disruptions.

Rubrik joins the CSAI Foundation as the centre's lead founding partner. Its contribution will include threat research from Rubrik Zero Labs, product telemetry, and input from senior executives to support the centre's research and governance work.

Resilience focus

The centre will be guided by an advisory committee of resilience specialists, cybersecurity practitioners, and leaders responsible for resilience at board level. Its work is also expected to connect with other CSAI programmes focused on AI security and safety.

Its first areas of work include an AI Resilience Reference Architecture, board and executive briefings, tabletop exercise kits, and guidance for security and technology practitioners. The aim is to make AI resilience a more clearly defined operational discipline as organisations embed AI more deeply into daily processes.

Kavitha Mariappan, Chief Transformation Officer at Rubrik, said the lack of visibility around AI agents is already a concern for many security teams.

"AI agents are already inside the enterprise, and most security teams can't tell you what those agents do," Mariappan said.

"The AI Resilience Centre of Excellence gives us a vendor-neutral hub for developing observability frameworks supported by independent research and aggregated customer data. Addressing AI resilience systematically now will help organizations recover more quickly and efficiently in the future."

The issue has moved beyond conventional cyber defence as organisations test AI systems in more sensitive environments, including critical infrastructure and public services. That broader risk was reflected in comments from Jen Easterly, Chief Executive Officer at RSAC, which is sponsoring the centre.

"AI is rapidly changing not only how organizations operate, but also how essential services, economies, and societies function," Easterly said.

"Organisations must be prepared to anticipate failures, contain their impact, recover quickly, and learn from what happened. But the challenge goes beyond enterprise resilience. As AI becomes embedded across critical infrastructure and public services, societies must also build the capacity to withstand disruption and adapt safely to transformational change. RSAC is proud to sponsor the AI Resilience Centre of Excellence and support a community-driven effort to make resilience a practical discipline for the AI era."

Industry response

The Cloud Security Alliance said the centre was created in response to an expected rise in AI-driven failures, whether caused by malicious actors or by the complexity of deploying AI at scale. That places the initiative at the intersection of cyber resilience, operational risk, and governance.

Jim Reavis, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of the Cloud Security Alliance, linked the need for the new centre to both the pace of AI adoption and the challenges created by autonomous systems.

"As organizations accelerate their adoption of AI and autonomous systems, they're also entering an era where AI-driven failures will become increasingly common, due to both sophisticated threat actors and the complexity of deploying AI at enterprise scale. Helping organizations solve these issues is why we founded the AI Resilience Centre of Excellence," Reavis said.

"Rubrik will help shape the research, frameworks, and best practices needed to advance AI resilience. Together, we're building a community dedicated to helping organizations navigate the challenges of the next generation of AI-powered systems."

The launch reflects a wider shift in the cybersecurity market as vendors, standards bodies, and public sector institutions adapt to the operational consequences of AI use rather than focusing only on model development or access controls. As AI systems take on more actions inside organisations, resilience planning is moving closer to the centre of enterprise risk management.

The Cloud Security Alliance described the effort as a community-driven programme intended to support practical implementation, with outputs aimed at both senior decision-makers and technical teams. The centre's work will cover not only prevention, but also response and recovery when AI systems fail or behave in unexpected ways.

Initial deliverables include governance guidance, maturity models, and resilience metrics intended to help organisations measure preparedness. The project also emphasises executive education, with board-level briefings and tabletop exercises designed to test how leaders respond to AI-related operational incidents.