With AI now assuming a central role in businesses across all industry sectors, ensuring that your organization is truly able to benefit and grow from the technology is key.
However, the growth in the use of AI has also seen a rise in threats against businesses – from hackers using their AI tools to develop and create more advanced strains of malware, to regulatory concerns over the vast amount of unstructured data being generated every day.
“There is no AI 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’re in, data is your lifeblood – and flexibility in attitude is important,” Iswaran tells me.
In an unsurprisingly buoyant mood following its recent $1.725 billion acquisition of Securiti AI, Eswaran explains how Veeam has recognized how there is 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, secure and manage data. If something goes wrong, more different tools are used – which can pose problems when 90% of the data is unstructured – because the AI pipelines feeding the data are unreliable and don’t have the right degree of controls or policy permissions, leading to project failure.
“We are the only company that essentially looks at data across the entire lifecycle, the primary, backup, and AI pipelines — data creation all the way through the AI pipelines,” Iswaran points out.
He highlights a recent conversation with a customer who noted, “There is no AI without data security, and there is no trust in AI without data resilience – and that is exactly what we set out to achieve.”
“If you can’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 very quickly,” he adds.
Veeam’s goal, then, is to provide the first unified platform that combines data security controls, privacy management and data resilience, “to ensure the success of every AI project for every company,” says Iswaran.
“We look at this as the entire data lifecycle, and what we need to do at every step to make sure that you’re not only secure, flexible, resilient, and leveraging the data power of AI — you’re compliant.”
“In the age of AI, every company has a responsibility to ensure that its customers are guided in the right direction, and helping customers along the journey will put them on the right track,” adds Iswaran.
He points out that “companies and leaders are beginning to realize that the real problem with AI project failure lies in data security, reliability, and flexibility together. What makes it more difficult is that it is not just fragmented tools, but that the people within the company who look at them are actually different.”
“Big companies are starting to realize that data security is the only way you can create some degree of certainty about the success of an AI project…And if you can’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, bad actors will get involved very quickly — you’ll be surrounded on all sides.”
“That’s why having a unified platform around security resilience is so important – be aware of it, be aware of the roadmap, what you need to do to get on the right track… You don’t have the luxury of going slow to get this right.”
‘Magical’ AI – but for how long?
Looking to the future, it seems clear that Veeam is in a strong position to maximize its role as steward and protector of data across the entire AI pipeline – but, I ask Iswaran, is there a risk of AI taking over workplaces too much?
“Our company uses AI in almost every function and workflow, and it’s magical… and not at the expense of moving away, where humans are still in the mix — all it’s done is make us more productive, almost by accident, as if I’ve scaled the organization, allowed us to accelerate growth, accelerate profitability, and become more relevant to our customers,” he says.
“People talk about 90% of AI projects failing – but a project failing is a better outcome than a project succeeding with poisoned, hallucinogenic data – because that is dangerous.”
“I think we’ve asked this question[about AI]at every inflection point in humanity — when we talked about basic laptops, we asked this question when we talked about the Internet and mobile — and in every case, we said this is really big, 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, this is just a bubble – but the other way to look at it is that 10% succeed, early in the game, and the impact is huge when companies get it right!”
“I think every company needs to take a step back, not get caught up in the hype, and move to the exact use cases…and the companies that get there early will be the biggest winners in their industries.”
“That’s what we’re here to do — we’re here to remove the fear and fundamental barriers to how to unleash AI by unifying data security, all controls, and data resilience, together, so companies can worry about unleashing AI and worry about nothing else.”