As companies are exposed to more and more attackers, they’re realizing that cyber resilience is increasingly important. On this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast, presented by Commvault, Senior Director of Product and Ecosystem Strategy Michael Stempf joins Justin Warren, Karen Lopez, and Stephen Foskett to discuss the growing challenges companies face in today’s cybersecurity landscape. As more organizations transition to a cloud-first operation, they’re recognizing the heightened exposure of their data protection strategies to global compliance mandates like DORA and SCI. Adding to this complexity is the emerging threat of AI, raising important questions about how businesses can adapt and maintain resilience in the face of these evolving risks.
AI is Not a Fad
The current hype about building massive generative AI models with massive hardware investment is just one aspect of AI. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast features Frederic Van Haren, Karen Lopez, Marian Newsome, and host Stephen Foskett taking a different perspective on the larger world of AI. Our last episode suggested that AI as it is currently being hyped is a fad, but the bigger world of AI is absolutely real. Large language models are maturing rapidly and even generative AI is getting better by the month, but we are rapidly seeing the reality of the use cases for this technology. All neural networks use patterns in historical data to infer results, so any AI engine could hallucinate. But traditional AI is much less susceptible to errors than the much-hyped generative AI models that are capturing the headlines today. AI is a tool that augments our knowledge and decision making, but it doesn’t replace human intelligence. There is a whole world of AI applications that are productive, responsible, and practical, and these are most certainly not a fad.
Storage for AI: Data Professional Overview
The use of the term ‘data management’ is subject to varying interpretations between data professionals and storage providers, leading to some confusion when discussing the scope of services. Solidigm highlights the unique storage requirements for AI, as Karen Lopez wrote, emphasizing that AI servers need significantly more capacity and have specific data demands across different stages: Data ingest, Data prep, Training, Checkpointing, and Inference. As data professionals, our understanding of these distinct data workloads enables us to contribute valuably to discussions on data architecture, especially in collaboration with companies like Supermicro, who integrate these storage solutions into their AI server offerings.
Private AI Foundation With NVIDIA: Data Professional Overview
VMware by Broadcom, in partnership with NVIDIA, has introduced the Private AI Foundation, focusing on enhancing in-house data management and AI processing through privacy, choice, cost management, performance optimization, and compliance agility. As highlighted by Karen Lopez, data quality and protection are essential for accurate AI results, prompting data professionals to stay alert to components like vector databases for fast, complex data retrieval. Key takeaways emphasize the importance of not overlooking data fundamentals amidst AI advancements, reminding professionals that AI cannot replace the need for robust data management.
You Can’t Secure What You Don’t Know About: APIs
In this LinkedIn post, Karen Lopez shares her conversation with NoName Security about the importance of API security. She explains that as APIs serve as the primary way of accessing data in present times, ensuring their security, especially considering technical debt, becomes crucial to avoiding data breaches. She urges organizations to consider solutions such as those offered by NoName Security, which include features to discover, classify, manage, and assess the vulnerabilities of APIs.
Ways to Amplify Unvalued Security Teams in Organizations
The security staff is often the most unappreciated members of a workforce. It is a problem that seems to be at the root of its failings. With the exponential growth of networks and the increasing number of breaches, it is clear that security is a pressing issue. However, there is a lack of awareness and understanding surrounding the imperfections and limitations of security measures. It is essential for organizations to elevate awareness, forge a cohesive internal culture, and invest in the right tools and training to support their security teams. Additionally, responsible packaging and marketing from vendors can help buyers make informed decisions. Ultimately, removing obstacles and valuing security specialists is essential for ensuring cyber resilience. Watch the delegates from the recent Security Field Day event explore this at a roundtable discussion.
Secrets Are Difficult to Keep
HashiCorp is revolutionizing secrets management with their new offering, HCP Vault Secrets, as highlighted in Karen Lopez’s LinkedIn article. This solution provides organizations with a secure and flexible platform for storing, generating, and accessing sensitive information like API keys and passwords. With features such as tokenization, dynamic secrets, role-based access, and centralized management, Vault Secrets ensures the confidentiality and integrity of secrets across clouds and environments, while also offering auditing and compliance monitoring capabilities.
RackTop BrickStor – Protecting Data Against Ransomware
Data storage and security solutions provider, RackTop Systems, has introduced its BrickStor Security Platform (SP) that is designed to cover both insider and external threats to prevent ransomware attacks that have become prevalent in recent months. Karen Lopes explores their Data-Centric Zero Trust Policy approach in this sponsored article. It evaluates user behavior, account permissions, file activity, metadata about files and the user, and other features to protect unstructured data for SMB and NFS file shares, thereby enabling speedy detection and lock-out that saves money and time for the resumption of normal operations. The platform also identifies user behavior anomalies with User and Entity Behavior Analysis and, once detected, stops all access by that user that was the weak point.
Commvault GO: Mission Return
Data Evangelist with a focus on data quality and protection, Karen Lopez, attended Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019 in Denver, CO. Follow along as she shares details and news from her GO experience.
Right and Left Brain – Storage and Data Management
For Karen Lopez, in the rush for storage and backup companies to rebrand themselves as data management companies, they often forget that the messaging surrounding managing storage and managing data are very different from a customer perspective. At Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO, the company used the metaphor of brain lateralization to put it into perspective.
It’s a Go for Commvault GO!
As an independent industry analyst, Karen Lopez was invited again to attend Tech Field Day Exclusive at Commvault GO 2019 in Denver. This is her second time at this event and she’s looking forward to chatting with project teams about what they’ve accomplished in the last year. As a Data Evangelist with a focus on data quality and data protection, she’s going to be looking at topics that helps her love data better.
