Safeguarding AI Infrastructure with Dell Data Protection

Understanding the crucial role of data protection for AI.

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 88% of 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.

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.

Dell Solution for AI Data Protection and Dell AI Factory

The Dell Solution for AI Data Protection, an integral component of the Dell AI Factory infrastructure portfolio, ensures the security and recoverability of the data powering AI workloads. Organizations can leverage software and appliances, benefiting from the performance, efficiency and scalability that have established Dell as a leader in data protection.

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.

Dell Reference Design for AI Data Protection

Recognizing the pivotal role of data protection in preserving AI infrastructure integrity, Dell is introducing the Dell Reference Design for AI Data Protection, which is based on the Dell Scalable Architecture for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with NVIDIA Microservices. This blueprint can help guide organizations in seamlessly integrating robust data protection measures into their AI frameworks.

The reference design offers invaluable insights for planning and implementing enterprise-grade solutions to fortify AI workloads on Dell infrastructure. Encompassing backup and recovery, as well as cyber resilience, organizations can safeguard crucial AI components. The reference design will be available in Q2.

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 builds the foundation for secure infrastructure, ensuring organizations can recover from destructive cyberattacks swiftly and confidently.

For more perspective on protecting AI workloads read the research brief from The Futurum Group.

Rob Emsley

About the Author: Rob Emsley

Rob Emsley is the Director of Product Marketing for Data Protection at Dell Technologies. His team is responsible for messaging, content and go-to-market activities for the Dell data protection portfolio. Rob has held product marketing and management leadership positions with several global companies. Originally from the UK, he now resides outside of Boston, Massachusetts.