Jason Buffington .com

In 1962, JFK gave his famous moonshot speech to put an astronaut on the moon using a rocket “made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented”. They knew the outcome and the method years in advance – they also recognized a foundational component was missing even if they didn’t know how to create it … yet.

In the data protection space, we’ve all made the evolutionary jump from backup … by adding replication and snapshots to encompass data protection … and then we all started looking at the revolutionary leap to data management.

We started using words like intelligent data management or adaptive data protection. No disrespect to whomever owns those marketing phrases, the gap between the potential and the reality is contextual understanding of what you have. 

To actually accomplish data management or anything else aspirational on resilience with adjectives like intelligent or adaptive, you have to understand what you are protecting! It’s the difference between protecting data or information … versus just protecting files, blocks, and objects. When you’re just protecting files, blocks, and objects, the only intelligence is from the administrator manually clicking the mouse.

IF you (or your software) can ingest, comprehend, and categorize what is in those files and blocks, THEN you can understand the difference between which data requires 2-year versus 20-year retention, or which has PII or GDPR ramifications.

That intelligence has always been elusive … or as JFK put it, not yet invented … until recently. There’s a lot of vendors out there that want to whitewash AI on everything … or maybe enable you to interact with their product through a chatbot (that’s cool, too). To paraphrase a different JFK speech,

Think not about what AI can do for the backup admin,

but what AI can do for the backup platform and it’s processes.

If you want data management, or anything cooler than protecting your data for the intent of restoring it, then you need contextual insights on what it is you are curating. If you know that, then you can do some really disruptive things to ensure its resilience.

For data protection and IT BC/DR, that’s where AI starts to become interesting and differentiating.

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