Adoption of AI has led to an increase in demand for proper data governance, and companies are now under pressure to ensure data maturity. worldwideMany companies are using or exploring AI, and more than 82% are actively leveraging or considering AI for business operations. However, according to Gartner, only 14% of network leaders can balance the use of their data and ensure that their data meets business goals.
As more and more businesses are eager to leverage AI, they need to ensure they run on peak data maturity, with the appropriate framework to handle the critical data they manage more and more. By leveraging the data maturity model framework, organizations can identify the most effective ways to optimize data usage, helping identify security gaps and improve data efficiency. As part of this framework, organizations also need a mature data management strategy.
One of the most overlooked parts of a mature data management strategy is having appropriate storage requirements to back up and store critical data. Businesses face many threats in their data security, and proper storage of AI workloads may be the only way to prevent AI-generated data from being lost or tampered with as a result of ransomware or other disasters. Your business may have the capabilities of AI, but is your storage infrastructure ready?
Why must participate in AI conversations
There are many reasons why proper storage is critical to data created and consumed by AI – businesses need to ensure data is easily accessible, securely accessible, can recover evolving threats in the event of disaster, and must be optimized for AI workloads.
Accessibility is important because developers must be able to quickly and efficiently find and leverage data to train other AI algorithms. In most cases, this type of data is considered “task critical” and is most valuable to business operations. Having such data is easy to use is the key to ensuring the most important streamlined process.
This data also needs to have the highest level of security when stored. Given that 96% of ransomware attacks now target backup data, storage needs to be protected against lansomware-Proge-Proge and is able to withstand any downtime or disruption that an organization may face. Backups are the main targets of attackers because they prevent companies from recovering data and are therefore more likely to pay a ransom to retrieve critical data. At the same time, if “mission critical” data is not accessible, it can leave the enterprise unprepared and face longer IT outages. This could result in reputation and currency losses, which would be devastating for shareholders, customers and employees.
A cybersecurity attack is not the only reason that it is possible to lose or manipulate storage. Production data or data used in the day-to-day operations of an enterprise should always be considered destroyed or destroyed. Therefore, there must be a gold recovery copy or a clean, reliable and isolated copy of critical data. Unexpected deletion, overwriting of data, or any other errors caused by human errors may harm your data. Software and hardware failures (such as corruption or viruses) can also put your data at risk, especially if your software and hardware are not updated. Finally, environmental factors such as power outages, flooding, and extreme weather are good reasons to ensure backup data can be restored.
Additionally, AI tools can generate too much data at an exponential rate, and traditional storage architectures may not be able to keep up with the amount of data required. Therefore, AI storage must be equipped to effectively handle large-scale workloads. Using scalable and secure data storage, such as hierarchical storage solutions, will provide the best functionality for monitoring and saving data.
Best storage for AI data (not breaking the bank)
Tiered backup storage ensures quick access to important data and is one of the most cost-effective solutions. It allows data retention, allowing data to be accessed and reused at any time. Tiered storage and backup organize data according to its importance and frequency of access. High-priority data is as fast and expensive to store as SSDs, while less critical data is stored on cheaper, slower media such as HDDs or cloud storage. Specifically, considering the above requirements, AI data should be stored in layer 0 or layer 1. Tier 0 is a high-speed storage of mission-critical data with NVME media types and an all-flash storage array. Tier 1 is a high-performance storage of common data with SSD and Hybrid Flash Storage media types.
Going further, backing up data in hierarchical storage as frequently as possible will allow quick access in the face of disasters, such as human errors or malicious changes. Ensuring backup data stored in multiple locations, with multiple types of encryption, and copies of various media types is the only way to ensure backups are secure.
When choosing an anti-ransomware backup and storage provider, it is important to make sure you choose immutable storage that can withstand any disaster that could put your data at risk. It is important to note that not all unchanged storage is provided on this Agreement. If the “immutable” data can be overwritten by a backup or storage administrator, vendor, or attacker, then it is not a truly immutable storage solution. Understanding the core concept of true immutability will help separate secure backup systems from empty vendor claims.
These five requirements help define backup storage environments that bring immutability:
- S3 object storage: Fully recorded open standards, natural and non-number-based, and can achieve independent penetration testing
- Zero time to invariance: Backup data must be immutable at the moment of writing
- Zero access destructive action: No administrator (internal or external) is able to modify, delete or reset immutable data.
- Breakdown of backup software and storage: Backup software and backup storage must be physically isolated to prevent compromised credentials from being used to change or corrupt data and provide resilience for other disasters.
- Hardware form: A dedicated device isolates immutable storage space on the virtualized attack surface and should remove all risks during setup, update and maintenance.
By meeting these requirements, organizations can ensure immutability, ensuring that anything that happens (threat within the scope or credential violation) remains protected and recoverable.
As AI becomes a consistent tool for enterprises, they need to adopt and identify better data management and infrastructure to ensure data maturity. The answer may lie in hierarchical storage and backups, which is the best way to ensure large amounts of data created and trained by AI and allow the ability to quickly access and ensure this critical and scalable data.
