From the days of floppy disks and eventually hard drives, IBM has been a consistent global leader in computer storage.

Today, the company’s crop of enterprise data storage solutions is built on proprietary FlashCore Modules for high throughput and consistent latency. But, more importantly, those FCMs have been fitted with capabilities for full-scale data resiliency.

“We want to make sure that … you’re going to have copies of data you can come back from,” said Ian Shave (pictured), director of worldwide distributed storage and data resilience sales at IBM. “The new thing we’ve added is that we can discover when the threats are actually getting in, and I think this is the great combination of both the software of the array and … the elements that we’ve got in our FlashCore Modules.”

Shave spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at IBM Storage Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the cybersecurity improvements permeating IBM’s enterprise storage solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Harnessing AI for a nimble, proactive system

IBM’s entire storage system functions through intelligence that detects incoming threats and can alert the company in a much shorter time span than before. In turn, security countermeasures can be taken long before threats shut down systems, according to Shave.

“We’ve seen when threats actually come in, one of the biggest issues is them not knowing … it’s the ransom demand or everything stopped working tends to be the alert mechanism,” he explained. “We want to give them much better visibility than that. We want to make sure the moment that data is being encrypted or corrupted, or anybody’s playing with it, we want to make sure we’re letting them know really quickly.”

Artificial intelligence facilitates that visibility, both in the system itself and with the metadata needed for real-time analysis, according to Shave.

“We can help have that intelligence, leverage AI, leverage what’s next so that we can be sure that we understand the patterns of these threats and can let customers know really quickly, as well as obviously other kind of issues that may arise within the system,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Storage Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Storage Summit. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE