How AI-powered data protection is evolving

Throughout 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) has consistently proven its value to businesses looking to cut costs, improve efficiency, and reduce staff workloads. These advantages will become even more apparent as 2023 progresses, since businesses that want to stay competitive will need AI-powered solutions that can handle complicated problems as well as repetitive tasks.

By automating tedious, low-value tasks, AI and machine learning (ML) solutions can free up staff from the burden of running day-to-day business operations. With rising labor costs and an impending recession, these technologies will completely change how business is conducted.

One area of business that can particularly benefit from AI-powered automation is data protection, where the quantity, quality, and scale of data is making it virtually impossible for an IT team to have full manual oversight. IT firms will seek autonomous data security solutions in the new year that deliver real cost savings, boost operational effectiveness, and minimize or completely remove human interaction.

Using AI to automate data protection

AI-powered data protection is the way of the future for companies to properly manage their data while freeing up the time of the IT employees to promote wider company growth. Successful automation can eliminate backup failures, which is increasingly important as IT teams everywhere are under resource pressure.

The current state of data protection is unrealistic—expecting businesses to have dedicated teams to manage everything from backups, SLOs (Service Level Objective), RPOs (Recovery Point Objective), RTOs (Recovery Time Objective), and to diligently troubleshoot failures. 

In reality, workloads have become more complex, data growth has accelerated, and the majority of enterprises today use hundreds of enterprise applications. IT teams—particularly backup administrators—are under even more pressure to put a lot of time and energy into data protection activities.

Organisations can release these backup administrators from the data avalanche by implementing AI-enabled technologies, allowing them to concentrate on the business's overall IT and security strategy. Additionally, by 2023, AI will be able to handle more than just administrative issues. From identifying unusual user behaviour to tracking it within the data itself, AI and ML analytics in cybersecurity can proactively support the cybersecurity posture of the entire organisation, bringing about a radical simplification of operations as well as increased security and cost savings.

Delivering these savings will be especially important in the future since, in light of macroeconomic uncertainty, cost-cutting will be a top board priority. By utilising automation technologies to supplement the IT workforce, automate back-end procedures, and eliminate expensive administrative backlogs, the effective use of AI is one way that contemporary solutions can assist organisations to navigate through a downturn. Additionally, new SaaS-based AI solutions allow businesses to only pay for the services they use, reducing wasteful expenditures and eliminating overhead costs for the entire company.

AI-powered metadata

Businesses can greatly profit from AI, particularly in the area of data backup and recovery. Saving money is one advantage, and the ability of AI to extract insights from metadata is another.

In the past, recovering customer data from a breach or data loss was the sole purpose of data protection. The best strategy right now is autonomous data protection enabled by AI and metadata. Autonomous protection is the hyper-automation that locates bottlenecks, fixes them, and proactively prevents them so that backups simply function. It is driven by the metadata ecosystem of environmental conditions, resource consumption, and workload change patterns from billions of cloud-based events. This hyper automation can manage schedules, policies, and data protection resources such that data protection management itself becomes autonomous. 

These rich metadata ecosystems can be processed securely to provide security posture management, ransomware prevention, governance, privacy, etc., as a service. These solutions use AI/ML to provide ease, security, and cost savings to enterprises. These "as a service" options will be crucial, especially as ransomware develops into a more sophisticated and inventive threat and as cyber security remains one of the top objectives for enterprises.

Staying resilient in the new year

AI tools and systems will continue to be essential for organisations across all sectors in 2023 and beyond. Given the likelihood that the economy will remain uncertain into the New Year, innovation in the field of artificial intelligence will be crucial if it is to provide businesses with real savings and free up teams to perform jobs that create value.

Businesses can revitalise their data security strategies and eliminate backup failures by applying AI-enabled tools, enabling the company and its data to be robust against upcoming threats.

Preethi Srinivasan is the Director of Innovation at Druva.