With artificial intelligence now playing a central role in business across all industries, ensuring that your organization can truly benefit and grow from this technology is key.
However, the rise in the use of AI has also led to an increase in threats to businesses – from hackers using their own Artificial Intelligence Tools develop and create more advanced malware strains, as well as regulatory concerns about the avalanche of unstructured data being generated daily.
“There is no artificial intelligence without data security”
“We live in an era where no matter how regulated your industry is, data is your business model… it doesn’t matter what industry you belong to, data is your lifeblood and sustainability matters,” Eswaran tells me.
Unsurprisingly in high spirits after its recent $1.725 billion acquisition of Securiti AI, Eswaran reveals how Veeam realized there was a “real struggle” for companies looking to make the best use of AI.
Technology is transforming businesses, but they often use different tools to understand, protect and manage data. If things go wrong, more different tools are used (which, when 90% of the data is unstructured, can create problems) because AI data feed pipelines are not trusted and do not have the right level of control or policy permissions, causing the project to fail.
“We are the only company that essentially looks at data across the entire lifecycle, primary and backup, and AI pipelines—from data creation to AI pipelines,” notes Eswaran.
He recalls a recent conversation with a client who noted that “there is no AI without data security, and there is no trust in AI without data security—and that’s exactly what we set out to achieve.”
“If you don't keep up with the pace of what you need to do to leverage AI, your industry will be disrupted, your company will be disrupted, and bad actors will step in very quickly,” he adds.
Veeam's goal, Eswaran said, is to provide the first unified platform that integrates data security controls, privacy management and data resiliency “to ensure that every AI project for every company can be successful.”
“We look at it as the entire data lifecycle and what we need to do at each stage to make sure that you're not only safe, secure and resilient, but also leveraging the power of data for AI, you're compliant.”
“In the age of artificial intelligence, every company has a responsibility to ensure you are guiding your customers down the right path,” adds Eswaran, “and helping customers along the way will set them on the right path.”
“Companies and executives are starting to realize that the real problem with AI projects failing is actually the integration of data security, reliability and resilience,” he notes, “and what complicates things is that it's not just about fragmented tools, but the people within the company who are looking at it are actually different.”
“Large companies are starting to realize that data security is the only way to create some degree of confidence in the success of an AI project… and if you don't keep up with the pace of what you need to do to leverage AI, your industry will be disrupted, your company will be disrupted, and bad actors will infiltrate your life very quickly—you will be surrounded on all sides.”
“That’s why bringing together a single platform for security resilience is critical – remember that, remember the roadmap and what you need to do to get on the right path… you don’t have the luxury of going slow to get it right.”
“Magical” AI – but for how long?
Looking to the future, it appears that Veeam is clearly in a strong position to maximize its role as gatekeeper and data guardian across the entire AI pipeline, but I ask Eswaran, is there a risk of AI taking over jobs too much?
“Our company uses AI in almost every function and workflow,” he says, “and it’s magical… and it’s not at the cost of opting out, since humans are still in the process—all it’s done is make us more productive, almost by accident, like I’ve scaled the organization and allowed us to accelerate growth, increase profitability, and become even more relevant to our customers.”
“People say that 90% of AI projects fail, but a project failing is a better outcome than a project succeeding with poisoned, hallucinatory data, because that’s dangerous.”
“I think we've asked this question (about AI) at every human inflection point—when we talked about basic laptops, we asked this question when we talked about the Internet and mobile devices—and in every case we said this is really important, but each of those inflection points turned out to be much bigger than we thought.”
“One way to look at AI is to think, wow, 90% of projects fail and it's just a bubble – but another way to look at it is: 10% succeed this early in the game, and the impact when companies get it right is huge!”
“I think every company needs to take a step back, not get caught up in the hype, and get to the precise use cases… and the companies that get this right early on will be the big winners for their industries.”
“That's what we're here for – we're here to remove the fear and the fundamental barriers to how AI can be unlocked by unifying data security, all controls, data resiliency, coming together so that companies can worry about AI disclosure and not worry about anything else.”
