N-able and Futurum Report Shows AI Transforming Cyber Resilience Strategies
Findings underscore a widening resilience gap as AI accelerates both business innovation and adversarial tradecraft
N-able, Inc. , a global cybersecurity company delivering business resilience, announced the release of Cybersecurity in the Age of AI: Moving from Fragile to Resilient, an N-able-sponsored research report authored by The Futurum Group. The new study examines how AI is redefining the threat landscape for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and outlines a modern framework for minimizing exposure, reducing impact, and maintaining operational continuity in an era of machine-speed attacks, to ultimately build meaningful business resilience.
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The report highlights that SMBs face a rapidly escalating threat environment fueled by AI-driven automation, industrialized social engineering, and increasingly complex IT ecosystems. According to companion research from Futurum cited in the report, 62% of mid-market organizations agree that AI-driven phishing and deepfake scams are on the rise. As AI becomes a dual-use technology, organizations must rethink traditional, reactive cybersecurity playbooks that cannot keep pace with adversaries who are weaponizing AI, and embrace a strategy built on the intelligent use of AI.
“AI is accelerating everything: innovation, productivity, and unfortunately, adversarial tradecraft,” said Mike Adler, Chief Technology and Product Officer at N-able. “What this report makes clear is that resilience is no longer a passive goal. Businesses need modern, unified cybersecurity foundations that help them eliminate vulnerabilities before they’re exploited, stop active threats at machine speed, and recover quickly using verified, resilient data.”
The report’s analysis finds that AI is amplifying two parallel forces:
1. Accelerated Adversary Tactics
Threat actors are leveraging AI-enhanced reconnaissance, scalable social engineering, and eventually autonomous attack chains. SMBs that are already constrained by limited staff and generalist security teams, face widening disadvantages as AI lowers the barrier to executing advanced attacks, enhanced reconnaissance, scalable social engineering, and eventually autonomous attack chains.
2. Increased Internal Complexity and “Shadow AI”
As businesses adopt AI tools for productivity, IT environments are becoming denser, more interconnected, and harder to secure. New APIs, external services, and unmanaged AI tools expand the attack surface and create opaque risks that traditional monitoring cannot adequately detect.
To help SMBs move from fragile to resilient, the report presents a three-pillar model aligned to the full threat lifecycle, before, during, and after an attack:
- Minimize Exposure (Before): Hardening endpoints, managing configuration drift, and proactively reducing the attack surface using automation and AI-assisted insights.
- Reduce Impact (During): Deploying real-time behavioral detection, contextual intelligence, and trusted machine-speed containment to stop threats before they evolve into business-disrupting events.
- Maintain Continuity (After): Ensuring fast, verified recovery using AI-assisted data integrity checks and automated recovery validation to restore operations with confidence.
“AI is a game changer when it comes to accelerating security efficiency and closing gaps like skills shortages, but it’s paramount that you approach it with the right mindset,” stated Marc Umstead, President, Plus 1 Technology. “At Plus 1 Technology, we’ve taken AI to heart both as a driver of business resilience, and a cautionary tale. The only way to beat the threat actors at what they’re doing, is to stay one step ahead; ignoring AI isn’t the answer.”
Fernando Montenegro, Vice President and Practice Lead for Cybersecurity & Resilience at The Futurum Group, added: “Our research shows a clear and urgent need for businesses to evolve beyond reactive security models. The organizations making progress are adopting AI driven resilience strategies that prioritize visibility, automation, and safe, deterministic execution.”
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