Understanding the crucial role of data protection for AI

By Srinivaschary T, Lead, Solution Architect, Dell Technologies India

As organizations rush to harness the transformative potential of AI, they seek comprehensive strategies to simplify the implementation of these solutions. Dell Technologies is facilitating this journey through the Dell AI Factory, which provides targeted and repeatable success for deploying AI solutions. Built on the industry’s pioneering end-to-end AI-optimized infrastructure portfolio and open partner ecosystem, Dell is propelling AI adoption forward.

Among the advantages of the Dell portfolio is the integration of data protection within the infrastructure stack. This is paramount given Dell’s Global Data Protection Index for 2024, which revealed that an overwhelming 55% of Indian organizations acknowledge the imminent challenge of safeguarding the immense volumes of data generated by AI.

There exists a legitimate concern that components of AI applications, such as large language models (LLMs), could create new attack surfaces for cybercriminals. All organizations must grasp the consequences of compromised AI data that lacks protection. According to research by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, Reinventing Backup and Recovery with AI and ML, 65% of organizations confess to regularly backing up only up to 50% of their total volume of AI-generated data. According to the Dell Technologies 2024 Innovation Catalyst report, 92% of Indian businesses feel security operations mostly consist of patch management/ security updates. In the current threat landscape, this approach could potentially expand the threat surface for businesses. The report also found that 94% of Indian organizations felt AI and/or GenAI could help them prevent, detect, and respond to out-of-policy threats and behavior from their workforce, be it escalating cyber threats, human errors, system failures or natural disasters, the risk of data loss hangs over AI applications, as it would for any other mission-critical data.

How can Dell Technologies Help?

Dell assists organizations in assessing their AI data protection requirements ensuring peace of mind regarding safeguarding before deployment into production. While AI workloads may vary, there are several critical areas to consider regarding data protection.

AI training data - In the case where training data is retrieved from multiple source locations, including internal sources and public cloud services, into one location for the purposes of consolidating a single set of training data, it may be advisable to back up that data set as a singular set related to the models built from that set.

AI models - It may be desirable to back up AI models along with the consolidated data set and its parameters together for consistency and recoverability.

AI compliance - For regulatory compliance and long-term retention, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), chain of custody and audit purposes, archival backups of all assets related to model creation, including the model and its parameters, as well as output data may be necessary.

AI cyber resilience - Cyber resiliency to maintain data integrity with immutability through layers of security and controls, separation of critical data from attack surfaces through physical or logical data isolation and ensuring data can be recovered safely in the event of an attack through AI-based machine learning and analytics.

Innovate Securely with Dell Data Protection: Modern, Simple, Resilient

Dell Data Protection offers modern solutions designed to protect all workloads across multicloud, on-premises and edge environments cost-effectively. These solutions are simple to deploy, providing consumption flexibility, ease of deployment and streamlined operations. With resilient solutions, Dell Technologies builds the foundation for secure infrastructure, ensuring organizations can recover from destructive cyberattacks swiftly and confidently.