In this podcast, we speak with Vigitrust CEO Mathieu Gorge on the topics discussed at the recent RSA 2023 event in San Francisco. These include the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on storage, backup, and compliance, and the use of AI in areas such as data classification.
Gorge also discusses the resurgence of interest in data classification and its usefulness in managing access and tracking enterprise-held data, which can be critical for compliance and storage management.
Antony Adshead: What were the main themes of RSA 2023?
Mathieu Valley: RSA 2023 was probably one of the busiest ever. I’ve been attending for about 20 years and I think everyone was thrilled to be back to face-to-face meetings after COVID-19.
Like many others, I 100% expected AI to be the story. In terms of industry risks, data protection, storage and backup risks, I would say about 50% of the talk was about AI.
But there’s also a lot of talk about all things AI-powered, with quite a few vendors now claiming their solutions are AI-powered. In reality, some people do and some people don’t.
Other talks at RSA were on more fundamental issues such as risk. A big change from the previous five or six years. Everyone went back to basics and talked about data, ecosystem, users, and board risks. This was actually quite refreshing as we had a serious discussion about what we were trying to keep as opposed to a vendor fest.
In that vein, we have seen a resurgence in data classification. This technology is not new and has been around for years, but it hasn’t been featured much at RSA in the last few years. Now we’re back to talking about risk, how AI might affect how we collect and create new data, or data leaks. Data classification is now firmly back on the agenda. From my point of view, that’s a very welcome thing.
Adshead: What are the major implications for storage and backups with these high-profile changes?
Valley: We often talk about how we manage ecosystems and different silos. You can’t protect what you don’t know. Therefore, we encourage you to take advantage of new data classification technologies. Some AI-powered technologies can proactively avoid potential problems with your data.
So what data do you want to keep? What data did you get that you shouldn’t? And how can that data be protected?
RSA also saw the return of privileged access management and access rights. So who needs access to what data and when?
In this regard, we need to go back to the basics and consider whether we are collecting too much data, do we really need that data, and if so, are we keeping it under a proper storage framework? I think. Based on accuracy, access, availability, typically GDPR, etc.?
Therefore, data classification is important. Data management, access to data and of course where data is stored and again one of the issues is knowing which cloud provider you are using or using the right cloud provider, the right type of provider. is whether there is data? This is also a new feature from RSA 2023.
