• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, November 16, 2017

According to a new report from UniTrends, whether called AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning or predictive analytics, new intelligent systems are making our lives simpler and more productive. Driverless cars empowered by AI are a great example of what can be done to improve devices that were formerly entirely dependent on human direction.

Similar advancements are taking place in Information Technology solutions that make administrators faster and more efficient. AI is beginning to automatically perform tasks that now require human intelligence, such as identifying and automatically recovering from ransomware, and recognizing the differences between real and false disaster recovery situations.

AI advancements are already being integrated in solutions responsible for backup and data protection. Backup tools touch all corporate data, and advancements in AI are starting to neutralize security threats, direct backups to the best storage option, mitigate performance issues, and enhance operational efficiencies.

The report shows 10 ways to use Artificial Intelligence to your advantage:

1. RANSOMWARE DETECTION

Ransomware and other criminal attacks are a real and growing threat to enterprises of all types. As the attackers evolve, IT threat detection must evolve as well to avoid false positive and negative alarms. Machine learning is already employing techniques that can detect high probabilities of ransomware infection through learning and analyzing change rates, data entropy and randomness of data

2.  BUSINESS POLICY AUTOMATION

Administrators are asked to align data management and availability tactics to business policies, many times without really understanding how details such as file locations and snapshot schedules impact availability and recovery results. AI-based Business Policy Automation allows administrators to define and schedule backups based on specific recovery objectives. Once set, predictive analytics will determine exactly how long it will take to recover the workloads, and the software will automatically engage in determining the steps required to meet those recovery goals.

3. APPLICATION RECOVERY TIME PREDICTIONS

Applications today are complex stacks of software, data, databases, and settings frequently spread across disparate hardware. If any one of the components is out of line, a critical application will remain unavailable to business users. Intelligent tools are now available to identify, simulate, and test the many steps required to recover complex applications and determine if an application will be truly available for use. These tools enable IT to understand in advance if they can meet business recovery goals.

4. DATA LOSS PREDICTIONS

One of the most impactful consequences of downtime is the loss of data. Data loss in downtime can include the corruption of stored or in transit files as well as not capturing business data that would have been produced during a downtime event. Lost sales records, customer contact information, and employee production all have real business value.

5. ECONOMIC IMPACT PREDICTIONS

Most IT jobs are task and data focused, but IT also needs to be a business partner and answer business questions such as how long a downtime event will last and what it will cost in terms of real dollars. Intelligent tools are able to project the costs of both, supplying teams with potential impact ranges for a variety of outage and attack scenarios.

6. INITIATE RECOVERY PROCEDURES

For companies still using non-AI enabled technology, recognizing and initiating recovery procedures is a very manual task. Applications can sit suspended and non-performing for extended periods until a user alerts IT administrators that they can’t do their job. Tools that monitor the heartbeat of applications and enable hot-failover for failed systems exist as high-cost hardware solutions in some high end data centers.

7. HARDWARE FAILURE PREDICTIONS

Predictive analytics enables devices to understand what is inside the range of normal performance. With remote monitoring, slight performance anomalies can predict future issues. As intelligent devices gain greater knowledge from analyzing larger volumes of data, they will more accurately predict failures so recovery tactics can be taken before users are affected.

8. DATA PLACEMENT DECISIONS

IT Administrators have more choices than ever in where to store data – local servers, SANs, NAS, cloud or archived cold storage – and on what types of media and for how long. Machine learning and AI backup devices are coming to market that can translate business objectives into strategies for storage locations, and automate the migration of aged archival data to less expensive, long-term media.

9. TEST ENVIRONMENT ORCHESTRATION

Today, administrators must manually create test environments for software version testing, analytics, patch tests, or what/if analysis. Intelligent backup tools are able to automatically create test environments without human intervention and without risking production environments. The criteria for when and what to include in test environments is fully automated.

10 IT RESILIENCE

While some of the above is already on the market, the next step in Simpler, Smarter IT is ITR (IT Resilience). ITR refers to an ever growing set of technologies that work together to automatically take action to protect data and applications against just about any type of threat. Companies that do not move their solutions sets forward are at risk of not just falling behind the times, but losing their business due to data loss and outages.

To review the details of the report, please visit here.