In the event of a data emergency – say, a cyberattack or a natural disaster shutting down a data centre – no organisation wants to worry about whether they have secure, up-to-date backups, and whether they can be easily recovered.

Without the help of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML), fewer organisations can protect their backups against attacks, meet the necessary backup workload, or meet the defined service level agreements for the availability of information, applications, and infrastructures (or do so quickly and recover efficiently).

AI and ML are already indispensable technologies. They enable us to evaluate data from backup history, derive models for more efficient backup and recovery, and therefore help organisations make better predictions of data security events - from hardware failure and natural disasters to a successful cyberattack on the backups. 

In the event of an emergency, AI and ML also support the fastest and most efficient restoration of functioning infrastructure and data to get back to business as usual.

AI is not just a fun new tool – it’s become a critical necessity to stay ahead of sophisticated cybercriminals and thereby a vital asset in supporting corporate memory. Here are five ways in which IT teams can benefit from this innovative technology in regard to their backups.

By using time series-based ML to predict job run times, AI and ML-powered data management platforms constantly improve the job calendar through optimal sequencing.

Cyber-resilient data protection platforms calculate best possible recovery point objectives for cyber-resilient data protection and prioritise recovery workloads based on availability targets. 

At the same time, AI minimises the time windows necessary for data backup. If desired, all of this can be done fully autonomously, without IT managers having to intervene manually.

Personally sensitive information can also be searched for using key terms and classified into different security levels. This leads into risk analysis, which determines the level of threat of information based on context and metadata.

The future of AI is here

What was once a far-off dream is now today’s reality – organisations can do more with AI and ML than ever before, and even the capabilities we see now are advancing every day. 

These technologies are a gamechanger when it comes to backups: they protect against cyber-attacks, help to automate routine tasks, improve the efficiency of systems, and ultimately reduce a company's technical debt, for example through improved maintenance or timely and efficient updates.

It is time to recognise that AI can support your whole organisation, and not just in the ways that seem the most obvious. While backups might be one element of IT that we tend to set up and then forget about, it’s well worth considering the benefits that this technology could bring to this vital part of the data lifecycle.