Let’s kick off this article about Artificial Intelligence with a few very real facts…
1. Storage environments are getting bigger and more complex.
2. Cyber-attacks are getting more prevalent and more sophisticated.
3. IT and Security teams are under increasing pressure to do more with less.
It’s a harsh reality that most businesses are treading a fine line in the battle to stay ahead of cybercrime. IT and cyber security budgets aren’t growing in line with the size of the challenge, and a serious shortage of technical skills in the employee marketplace adds another obstacle.
A breach is coming. So, what can businesses do to prepare?
They can cross their fingers and hope their data recovery plans will work (the evidence suggests they won’t), or they can deploy Artificial Intelligence to deliver new levels of data resilience that would otherwise require a small army of security and storage technicians to achieve.
This article highlights three ways AI can boost your resiliency. Over the next 3 weeks we’ll dig into each of these in more detail.
1. Faster, more accurate threat-hunting
Malware is designed to evade detection. The reality is that your storage environment has probably already been compromised – you just don’t know it yet. Malware in your storage has the potential to render your backups and snapshots useless in a cyberattack and seriously derail your incident response.
Predatar found malware in more than 70% of its users’ storage within the first 90 days of deployment. That’s malware that had evaded perimeter cyber security tools such as EDR and XDR, and had not been detected by the anomaly detection that is built into most of the leading storage platforms.
Artificial Intelligence has a lot to do with Predatar’s dramatically enhanced threat-hunting capability.
Whether it’s spyware quietly collecting information, ransomware discreetly encrypting your files, or wipers deleting your data – malicious activity gives off ‘signals’. The challenge is finding these signals amongst the noise of busy, complex storage systems.
Traditional anomaly detection techniques fall-short when faced with sophisticated malware designed mimic the signals of legitimate data activity. As a result, malware either goes unnoticed, or often storage and security teams become overwhelmed with false-alerts, and waste valuable time and resources investigating threats that aren’t real.
AI has the ability to understand nuances in data behaviour that would simply be impossible otherwise. What’s more, it gets smarter over time – learning from false positives, to make AI-powered threat detection exponentially more effective that traditional anomaly detection.
2. See recovery risks hidden in complex storage
Most large businesses have multiple storage platforms in play. In our experience, typically it’s 2 or 3 platforms – but it can be as many as 5 or more. And the trend is an upwards one. As business bring new storage technologies on board, they need to maintain the old ones to manage their legacy data. Failed backup runs, unsupported software, unpatched vulnerabilities, and many other issues associated with storage administration have the potential to cause a major issue when it comes to recovering your data.
AI can’t replace storage administrators, but it can act as a powerful assistant, or a ‘storage sidekick’. AI can monitor all of your storage platforms, all of the time – highlighting potential issues that can otherwise slip through the net, and spotting trends and insights that would take a whole team of data analysts to uncover.
The result… powerful real time intelligence to help you make decisions, prioritise remedial action and mitigate risks.
3. Extensive knowledge at your fingertips
One of the biggest advantages of AI is that it makes information and knowledge more accessible than ever before. AI can tap into a whole universe of data, and thanks to Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and Natural Language Processing (NPL), it can instantly give you the information you need to answer even the most specific query – and deliver it in a way that’s tailored to you.
We’ve built NPL and a GPT into Predatar’s Recovery Assurance platform. Trained on technical documentation for market-leading leading storage technologies, our extensive ‘knowledge base’ of expert articles from Predatar engineers and consultants built-up over more than 10 years, and best-practice articles from industry leaders – our AI is empowering security and storage professionals with extensive cyber resiliency knowledge at their finger tips.
Wrapping-up
Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming critical for ensuring businesses are ready to launch a fast and effective response in the event of a cyber incident. Predatar is leading the way with AI for data resiliency.
Predatar’s R16: Orca release will ship with Aurora AI built-in, the world’s first AIOps assistant for Recovery Assurance. Find out more here, and stay-tuned as we dive deeper into this topic in the next few weeks.
