AI’s Impact on Data Protection Strategies Posted on : Apr 06 - 2020

Is your data protection strategy ready for artificial intelligence? Here are a few things IT leaders and businesses should keep in mind.

AI and machine learning are nothing new. From Siri, to self-driving cars, to biometric authentication, the development of AI and ML have been critical to enabling many technological advancements. However, while making life easier and more efficient, AI and ML can cause quite an issue for IT. The sheer volume of data resulting from AI can easily overrun data recovery and backup systems.

With data being the lifeblood of the modern enterprise, having solid data protection strategies is not a “nice to have” but a need to have. Especially with laws like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the more recent Washington Privacy Act, it’s more critical than ever for IT teams to have a clear understanding of the organizations’ backup and recovery plan. What can IT teams do to curb the impact and confusion that AI is having on data backup and recovery strategies? Here are a couple of things every business should know.

1. Understand what data you have and determine what you need to keep

The real problem seen all too often is that organizational backup and recovery strategies aren’t evolving fast enough. Data volumes continue to grow exponentially, and in the last year or so we’ve seen hyped technologies such as AI become more mainstream with widespread adoption. With this new structure of an organization's computing assets and new types of data requiring protection, businesses can’t simply “back everything up.”

Instead, they need to take stock in their data, determine what’s critical while evaluating what’s no longer priority data. If you don’t know what data you have or where it is, how can you protect it? Simple. You can’t. Having strong data protection starts with understanding your data and where it’s housed. It’s also important to ask what data’s absolutely necessary for business. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ with backup and recovery, and businesses must take a smarter approach.

For one, backing up everything isn’t cost effective and is overall inefficient and unrealistic. Not every piece of data that flows into your business is valuable for the business; don’t keep what’s not needed. Doing so puts you at risk of being noncompliant. For example, GDPR is famously broad when it comes to the definition of a data breach, including any incident that affects availability of personal data, incidents that can be mitigated by a robust backup and recovery strategy. Equally important to think about are individuals who opt-out of sharing personal data, i.e. “right to be forgotten.” If you’re not careful, you can end up recovering personal data that shouldn’t be recovered and become noncompliant. View More