In this interview from VeeamON 2026, Emilee Tellez, field chief technology officer of Veeam, joins Ray Umerley, field chief information security officer of Coveware by Veeam, to talk with theCUBE Research's Krista Case about how AI is accelerating cyber threats and why closing the gap between assumed and actual recovery readiness has become the defining challenge for modern enterprises. The discussion grows out of the pair's breakout session, "When Attackers Use AI Too," mapping how AI has compressed attacker dwell times to under 24 hours for some threat actors while simultaneously lowering the barrier to entry for less sophisticated adversaries. Umerley explains that the real danger is AI as an accelerant — amplifying the established foundations of cyber extortion, from encryption and exfiltration to identity compromise — rather than introducing fundamentally new attack vectors. Tellez underscores a persistent reality gap between executive confidence and operational readiness, noting that having backups is not the same as having a tested, defensible path to recovery.
The conversation also explores how identity has quietly become the central nervous system of every organization's security posture. Umerley notes that every breach he encounters begins with an identity compromise — not just stolen credentials, but the capture of tokens, secrets, integrations and privileges. Tellez builds on this with a striking data point from her session: as AI agent deployments scale toward an 82-to-1 ratio of non-human to human identities, overpermissioned agents are creating attack surfaces that many organizations haven't begun to govern. Together, they outline Veeam's newly announced Data and AI Trust Maturity Model (DRMM), a self-assessment framework designed to surface hidden gaps across operations, compliance and recovery readiness before a crisis forces the issue. Umerley emphasizes that the DRMM is not a pass/fail exercise — it's a structured discipline for asking the questions organizations have been avoiding. From AI-accelerated ransomware to the risk of destroying forensic evidence in a rushed recovery, the discussion makes a clear case for treating data as the anchor point of any modern resilience strategy.
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Emilee Tellez & Ray Umerley, Veeam
In this interview from VeeamON 2026, Emilee Tellez, field chief technology officer of Veeam, joins Ray Umerley, field chief information security officer of Coveware by Veeam, to talk with theCUBE Research's Krista Case about how AI is accelerating cyber threats and why closing the gap between assumed and actual recovery readiness has become the defining challenge for modern enterprises. The discussion grows out of the pair's breakout session, "When Attackers Use AI Too," mapping how AI has compressed attacker dwell times to under 24 hours for some threat actors while simultaneously lowering the barrier to entry for less sophisticated adversaries. Umerley explains that the real danger is AI as an accelerant — amplifying the established foundations of cyber extortion, from encryption and exfiltration to identity compromise — rather than introducing fundamentally new attack vectors. Tellez underscores a persistent reality gap between executive confidence and operational readiness, noting that having backups is not the same as having a tested, defensible path to recovery.
The conversation also explores how identity has quietly become the central nervous system of every organization's security posture. Umerley notes that every breach he encounters begins with an identity compromise — not just stolen credentials, but the capture of tokens, secrets, integrations and privileges. Tellez builds on this with a striking data point from her session: as AI agent deployments scale toward an 82-to-1 ratio of non-human to human identities, overpermissioned agents are creating attack surfaces that many organizations haven't begun to govern. Together, they outline Veeam's newly announced Data and AI Trust Maturity Model (DRMM), a self-assessment framework designed to surface hidden gaps across operations, compliance and recovery readiness before a crisis forces the issue. Umerley emphasizes that the DRMM is not a pass/fail exercise — it's a structured discipline for asking the questions organizations have been avoiding. From AI-accelerated ransomware to the risk of destroying forensic evidence in a rushed recovery, the discussion makes a clear case for treating data as the anchor point of any modern resilience strategy.
