A key element in IBM Corp.’s storage announcements on Thursday involved security and a critical need to protect vital business data in the event of a breach.

With the IBM Storage 5300 release, the company unveiled new technology, enabled by its FlashCore Module 4, which continuously monitors I/O statistics using artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect anomalies.

“We’ve been able to do something with our FlashCore module technology that is very unique,” said Andy Walls (pictured, right), chief technology officer and chief architect, IBM FlashSystem, at IBM. “The FCM-4 in particular has the capability of detecting statistics, of keeping track of statistics on a per IOP basis. That is really critical to be able to detect something is going wrong.”

During the “Future-Ready Storage” event, IBM’s London office tuned in.

Walls was joined for the discussion by Ian Shave (left), vice president of IBM Storage Data Resilience Solutions at IBM, for a webinar during IBM’s “Future-Ready Storage Redefining Data Center Boundaries” event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how new storage security tools can help organizations protect and recover data more easily. (* Disclosure below.)

IBM responds to changing threat landscape for data protection

The likelihood of something going wrong for many businesses today in the aftermath of an attack is apparently quite high, based on IBM survey data presented by Shave. IBM found that only one in seven respondents said they were able to recover all of their data following a breach, and the amount of time to get back up and running again was daunting.

“Eighty-nine percent took more than one day to resume normal business operations, and for nearly two-thirds of them that was more than four days,” Shave noted. “Clearly, something different needs to happen; there’s just a very different threat.”

To address the problems caused by cyberattacks, IBM has applied AI to its storage systems. Clients can leverage AI-driven predictive analytics and automation with IBM Storage Insights to receive near-instant notification when an attack occurs.

“Our research team has trained a model, an inference engine that’s running real time, and it has been trained for many different use cases,” Walls said. “This will be running on every Flash system that has the new release on 5300. If we detect that a ransomware attack has occurred, we then raise an alert to Storage Insights. Storage Insights will then alert the customer.”

The integration of security tools with the 5300 release comes at a time when regulatory bodies across the world are ramping up controls over the use of AI and data. The EU Data Act came into force in January, with full compliance required by September of next year. IBM’s security enhancements are designed to help businesses meet data protection obligations.

“It’s very top of mind, obviously, particularly in Europe right now,” Shave explained. “[Organizations] have to know they’ve got a copy of data they can come back from. They have to be able to prove that they can actually recover.”

Here’s the complete video discussion, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of IBM’s “Future-Ready Storage Redefining Data Center Boundaries” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM’s “Future-Ready Storage Redefining Data Center Boundaries” event. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE