As Indian businesses increasingly adopt hybrid cloud and generative AI technologies, they enter a double-edged landscape: that of increased efficiency and increased risk. While these digital tools enhance operational capacity, they also increase potential security challenges, industry experts told us during our webinar last week.
Libesh Babu, associate vice president at Federal Banksaid hybrid cloud allows the bank to leverage the scalability and cost-effectiveness of public clouds while maintaining control over sensitive data in private clouds. The bank currently uses multiple public cloud platforms, including Microsoft Azure, OCI (Oracle), AWS (Amazon), and GCP (Google), integrated with on-premises Kubernetes environments.
The Federal Bank was also an early adopter GénAItheir AI assistant “Feddy” uses natural language processing to provide conversational responses in multiple languages.

As Indian companies increasingly adopt hybrid cloud platforms, as the Federal Bank has done, their data becomes more dispersed, making security more complex, said Tushar Haralkar, principal country manager for IBM pre-sales for security software. “With data distributed across on-premises and cloud environments, visibility is essential. »
To address these challenges, IBM’s security model incorporates real-time monitoring and strict encryption protocols to protect data “at rest, in use and in transit.” Such measures help mitigate common security issues such as ransomware, ensuring that even if data is intercepted, it remains unusable without the bank’s encryption keys.
GenAI itself also requires protection, Haralkar added, warning that AI models can be tampered with, leading to deepfake or “hallucination” attacks that pose real risks, particularly in sectors like healthcare and finance.
Identity management has also become a crucial point of security, which is why you have so many passwords and access cards just to log in to work. Mahen Gawade, IAM business lead at Inspira Enterprise India, noted that hackers are no longer breaking in, they are logging in. Managing identities between systems has become essential as identities have become the new perimeter. With social engineering attacks and phishing on the rise, Gawade advocates for strict controls on identity verification. “We need to provide users with identity control while using AI to assess threats. Identity solutions that adapt to behavior patterns are key to minimizing risk in a hybrid cloud,” he said.
Imagine a smartphone that begins to recognize your unique patterns and behaviors over time. For example, it notices that you typically unlock your phone and check your messages around the same time each morning, or that you have a specific way of holding and typing on your phone. An identity solution based on behavioral patterns would use this information to tailor its security controls specifically to you.
Gawade also highlighted Inspira’s focus on decentralized identity solutions, where users can manage their own digital identity. “By using decentralized identities, we give users more control. Imagine walking into a bank or going through a job interview with verified digital credentials instead of physical documents: this is the future of identity in hybrid environments,” he explained.
As India’s digital economy continues to grow, the merger of hybrid cloud and GenAI will undoubtedly create new opportunities for businesses across sectors. However, experts say these advances require a reevaluation of traditional security models.