In today’s fast-paced and data-driven world, organizations face many challenges when it comes to managing and gaining insights from their ever-growing data estates. The sheer volume of data, the variety of data types, and the complexity of managing data across multiple locations can be overwhelming. Today we’ll examine a different approach to artificial intelligence (AI) that organizations can leverage to unlock the power of their data.
The power of AI is significant and growing rapidly. Organizations are already leveraging different aspects of AI in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, finance, transportation, and technology, among others. AI is now capable of performing complex tasks once thought to be the exclusive domain of workforces, such as language translation, image and speech recognition, decision-making, and even creative tasks like composing music or writing stories.
Here at Cohesity, we built AI into several of our product offerings years ago to help detect threats in customer data, classify large blocks of data, and protect critical data and workflows. We’re now doing even more. We recently announced a new collaboration with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI to bring organizations even more power around managing, securing, and protecting their data.
Data and AI
Data is one of the most important aspects of AI. It’s the fuel that powers AI algorithms, vectors, and context. But AI models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. The quality and quantity of the data used in training an AI model can significantly impact its validity, effectiveness, and power. If the data available to AI models is biased, incomplete, or inaccurate, the model may produce incorrect or biased results.
In addition, AI models require ongoing access to new data to continue learning and improving their accuracy over time. This is why data is so important to AI’s development and deployment. Organizations that invest in collecting, storing, and analyzing high-quality data are better positioned to leverage AI’s power to gain a competitive advantage.
But in today’s modern, distributed architecture, it can be complex to collect, collate, and leverage data from workflows across an organization’s data estate. Organizations are generally running infrastructure in a myriad of locations, spanning private data centers, single or multiple clouds, SaaS applications hosted by other organizations, and edge locations like stores, IoT devices, and many other applications.
They’re routinely storing petabytes (or more) of data without classifying, indexing, or tracking it. This is often referred to as “dark data,” and it’s typically unknown to the organization and is often unstructured and/or difficult to access. The main challenge with dark data is that it represents a missed opportunity for organizations to gain insights and make informed decisions, dramatically reduce their data costs, and secure and protect data—because they’re unaware of it.
AI-ready data with Cohesity
Cohesity set out to change how the world manages and secures data. When we created our Cohesity Data Cloud platform, we designed a unique architecture and distributed file system that enables organizations to:
- Back up their entire data estate and unlock new ways to protect and manage data
- Provide deep insights and analytics
- Replicate data for disaster recovery
- Improve cyber resilience with data isolation, threat detection, and data classification
Cohesity’s unique distributed file system also provides a significant advantage for organizations looking to unlock the power of their data, by leveraging the same data they’re already securing and managing with us to be fully leveraged with AI models.
Let’s take a look at what this means in application.
Indexing and instant search with Cohesity
Cohesity provides our customers with the ability to store and index unlimited data—structured or unstructured. Our differentiated approach to storing and indexing massive amounts of data enables organizations to instantly search across their entire data estate. Cohesity instant search enables users to quickly search for and locate specific data and was designed to provide fast, accurate search results. This allows users to quickly find the information they need without having to spend time manually searching through large amounts of data.
Plus, Cohesity provides a holistic view of data over time, so you can search decades-old data, instantly, and see different variations of it during different periods. This is incredibly important for AI-ready data. Other companies store data without indexing file and object metadata and have limited history available (only days) for searching or changes over time. Cohesity’s approach is truly distinct.
The Cohesity Data Cloud offers the following capabilities when preparing data for organizations and AI applications, including:
- Data aggregation and unification: Cohesity aggregates data from different sources and data types, including on-premises, cloud, and edge locations. This enables organizations to access all their data in one place, making it easier to analyze and grant secure access to data for AI applications. This unified view of data helps organizations identify patterns, trends, and anomalies that may not be visible in siloed data, while also dramatically reducing or eliminating dark data. Using backup data that is indexed and aggregated allows customers to leverage AI in a highly performant way that doesn’t consume too much storage space or compute power on production systems and without ever risking direct exposure of their production systems to AI applications.
- Data optimization: Cohesity efficiently deduplicates and stores data in compact structures which can be fortified with appropriate metadata that makes search more robust. Organizations can leverage this metadata in conjunction with AI applications to identify trends and patterns and make more informed decisions.
- Data protection: Cohesity helps organizations protect their data by providing enterprise-grade backup, recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. Backup and recovery with Cohesity helps organizations isolate their data in a virtual air-gapped environment in the event of a ransomware attack or other disaster. Organizations can rapidly recover and get back up and running quickly using Instant Mass Restore (IMR) to instantly recover thousands of VMs, databases, files and other data. Data is then available, resilient, and recoverable when needed—which is critical for AI applications that rely on large volumes of data.
- Data security: Cohesity provides organizations with comprehensive data security to proactively detect threats within their data to identify anomalies, like possible malware, using security threat feeds. Additionally, data classification is used to dynamically identify where sensitive and critical data sits, and cyber vaulting ensures if an attack happens organizations can mitigate the blast radius of an attack. It is important for AI applications to continue to run to ensure that business operations don’t stop, even in the event of an attack or disaster.
- Data access: Cohesity offers granular role-based access controls (RBAC) for backup data, and prevents users from accessing data they don’t have permissions for, like sensitive data (patient data/PII, trade secrets, financials, and more). This approach applies to AI, where the AI model only queries data and provides responses that align to users’ permissions.
Cohesity, with the power of AI, offers countless opportunities for organizations to unlock the power of their entire data picture over time. With Cohesity, organizations can create AI-ready data that’s clean, accurate, and available when needed, enabling them to develop and deploy AI models with greater speed and accuracy.
This blog is the first in our “Road to Catalyst” series. Check back every week for new AI content, and register today to join us at Cohesity Catalyst, our data security and management virtual summit, where AI will be among the featured topics.
