In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), one of the most important facets of data management is also one of the most overlooked – that of data protection. Every day more stories emerge of ransomware attacks, state-sponsored hacks, and other security breaches, and yet, for many data center operators, protecting the data entrusted can be a low priority as they focus on simply keeping the growing flow of data moving.

In this edition of DCD>Talks, Alex Dickins spoke to Sanam Mittal, general manager of data protection at Quantum Solutions. The company specializes in data in all its forms, ranging from tape and flash storage to analytics and e-governance. Who better to give us an overview of the problem, and possible solutions for cybersecurity in the data center?

Mittal speaks to us as the company launches its new DXI platform, offering cyber-resiliency, 70x data compression, all-flash recovery, and disaster recovery. He begins by explaining his perception of the current issues in the market:

“In the last decade or so, we have seen many drivers of data growth – you have web-scale computing and IoT devices. The world economy is moving towards digitization and analytics, and in the last year, we know AI has taken center stage: everybody's talking about generative AI. There's a lot of data being created, and today's data is not just bits and bytes, it's an asset. There is a lot of intelligence in data.”

From AI inference engines and analytics warehouses to sensitive medical, legal, and financial data, there are myriad targets for bad actors in the data center market, and as the data mountain explodes, it must all be effectively protected. Mittal cites one example:

“We hear stories about ransomware every day – schools not being able to access academic records, studios not being able to access their content, and banks not functioning. I'm in Northern California, and we recently had a local bank that experienced an attack. For three months, their ATMs weren't working, and millions of members lost their data, so the impact was huge.”

That’s why Mittal is adamant about the importance of not just protecting data, but talking about cyber resilience, something that he feels is not being done nearly enough:

“Nobody thinks about data protection. If I'm a business and my main focus is to run the business, I want to put my focus and priority there. Data protection is always an afterthought, it's surprising. I've come across many organizations that don't have a data protection or recovery strategy, and they just find out once they are hit.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than with mass-market artificial intelligence (AI) , which Mittal cites as an example of a problem that we have the potential to sleepwalk into:

“I don't hear about data protection for generative AI – all the ChatGPT output needs to be saved for decades. We don't talk about it or hear about it because it's always an afterthought.”

Mittal cites three elements of data processing:

• Data generators: Applications such as CRM, ERP, generative AI, and indeed any application that generates data that runs the business
• Data movers: Solutions that move data from the generator to the target – companies such as Veritas, Cohesity, and other build solutions
• Data protection targets: Where the data is protected, such as Quantum’s new DXI platform

Mittal goes on to talk about the pain points caused by these interactions. On one hand, data movers provide an excellent service to the data center, but conversely, create more touchpoints – with every touchpoint being a potential vulnerability:

“They want to make sure that the data stays safe and is protected, so they are moving from point A to point B and vice versa and this adds significant delay. What data movers try to do is either get close to the data generators and have some plug-in or some other interface, or they try to embed themselves into the target. That way, they reduce the latency, reduce the risk, and add more value by doing malware scans and other things, but they know their role is transitory and high risk.”

Targets, such as DXI, are what Mittal refers to as “data protection of last resort” and it is their job to ensure that data is stored safely and accessible for years, often decades to come:

“They must be efficient. You need the highest level of compression to save on storage, ingest within constraint, back up Windows, and in this day and age of cyber risk, be able to recover that data in a timely fashion for businesses to optimally run. They should be able to provide disaster recovery when systems are compromised.”

Mittal warns that, as most organizations recognize, ransomware attacks are now “a matter of when, not if” and the key to business continuity and disaster recovery lies in protecting your data with cyber-resilient solutions:

“Business continuity is very important. Flash systems are no longer as cost-prohibitive as they used to be a few years ago, so you're going to see more flash-based data protection coming into the market. Data management is becoming more complex as users face issues of data copies, silos, classification, governance, access, and overall quality of data that they need to maintain.”

Asked for his key piece of advice for data center operators, he tells us:

“Organizations need to look for a data protection solution that can manage all their data with a single control pane. You don't want multiple solutions trying to manage your data protection.”

To watch the whole of this DCD>Talk click here