Guest: Gaurav Rishi (LinkedIn)
Company: Kasten by Veeam (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk About AI

Data is the core fuel that powers all parts related to generative AI models. As enterprises increasingly adopt generative AI, protecting data becomes even more important in today’s rapidly changing landscape. “You need to meet customers and organizations where they are. I think that’s one of the powers that tools and technologies like generative AI bring in as the natural way of interacting is human language,” says Gaurav Rishi, VP of Product at Kasten by Veeam.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk About AI, Rishi talks about AI, how it intersects with data protection, the difference between the role of nature vs nurture for AI in Kubernetes, and what leaders should bear in mind before adopting and deploying AI in K8 environments.

Highlights of this video interview:

• It’s a moving landscape, and organizations need to recognize innovation across the entire stack and have dynamic playbooks from a security and data protection perspective.
• Rishi focuses on identifying the use case as the first step in the process of adopting AI and keeping the company’s strategy upfront. Organizations should experiment with AI but with an added lens amidst evolving regulations and copyright concerns in the industry.
• In the cloud-native world, security is a shared responsibility all the way from development to deployment. With AI, DevSecOps needs to be augmented as there are now even more people (like compliance and legal teams) who would be sharing this responsibility.
• Rishi discusses how AI for security and security for AI are truly an important framework as it’s a double-edged sword.
• Rishi also delves deeper into the nature (the right genetic traits for your code) vs nurture aspects (the operational best practices) of security and building your applications from a cloud-native perspective.
• According to Veeam’s 2023 Ransomware Trends Report, a whopping 85% of organizations were hit by at least one ransomware attack in the past 12 months. Underlying both nature and nurture, Rishi talks about how it’s important to strengthen your last line of defense and have backup disaster recovery policies in place tested on a regular basis.
• Rishi explains how Kasten by Veeam is leveraging all the good of AI to strengthen the product line. “We are taking Compliance-as-Code and regulatory principles and making it right up in your development cycle. At the same time, we are looking at both your red teams (who are ethical hackers) and your blue teams (which are doing defensive work), and leveraging the AI technologies to make sure your product is hardened,” says Rishi.
• Organizations may find it harder to embrace cultural changes compared to technological ones. As Rishi puts it, Kasten by Veeam can certainly help with cultural changes within organizations while adopting AI technologies.
• As KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America is just around the corner, the company expects a great number of partners to talk about how Kasten by Veeam is raising the bar while the event sees a lot more focus on security and ransomware this year.

This summary was written by Monika Chauhan.