Delivering Valuable AI Insights Requires Protecting AI Data Sources

In the AI Field Day 7 presentation, Subbiah Sundaram, Senior Vice President of Products at HYCU, highlighted the importance of data protection in the context of AI deployment and insights. Sundaram emphasized that protecting data is not limited to the raw data itself, but also includes configurations, metadata, and associated systems that power AI infrastructure. He outlined HYCU’s multi-faceted approach, starting with free data discovery across a broad range of sources, including SaaS, PaaS, DBaaS, and IaaS environments. Their platform helps enterprises continuously map out and visualize their data estates, identifying unprotected resources and automating categorization — a critical need in today’s highly distributed and complex IT landscape.

Sundaram delved deeper into the challenges of protecting data sources that fuel AI models, particularly in environments that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods to augment language models with proprietary data. The protection of vector databases, such as Pinecone and Redis, was noted as a key differentiator for HYCU, positioning it as the first enterprise backup vendor to offer such capabilities. He discussed how data spread across public cloud, SaaS platforms, and on-premises infrastructures can be managed and protected from a single control plane, offering portability, granular recovery, and ransomware resilience. Importantly, HYCU’s architecture is modular and API-driven, allowing customers and partners to rapidly integrate new SaaS sources ahead of the market, while also maintaining compliance and service-level agreements.

Throughout the presentation, Sundaram underscored a growing enterprise awareness of the need to protect operational and AI-related datasets as they move from experimentation into production environments. He revealed key industry data, showing that most organizations have experienced at least one SaaS-related data breach in the past year, with significant financial and operational impacts. HYCU’s approach ensures that customers retain ownership of their backup data, avoiding third-party control or markup of cloud storage services. Their global, scalable architecture supports all major cloud providers and emphasizes intelligent data locality to minimize costs. Overall, the presentation framed HYCU as a forward-thinking, customer-centric player in AI and data protection, uniquely positioned to help enterprises maintain data sovereignty, security, and continuity in accelerating AI adoption.