EM360 Tech is a platform that shares key IT industry insights and technology strategies with over 600,000 users, who trust the platform to help them make informed business decisions. In a recent podcast on the platform, FileCloud CPO, Jason Dover, spoke at length with Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. The stimulating […]
EM360 Tech is a platform that shares key IT industry insights and technology strategies with over 600,000 users, who trust the platform to help them make informed business decisions.
In a recent podcast on the platform, FileCloud CPO, Jason Dover, spoke at length with Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. The stimulating conversation focused on trends in the industry indicating that content collaboration, security, and compliance strategies are converging rapidly for many global enterprises.
During the conversation, Jason Dover notes that companies are attempting to translate the standards and approaches to storage in public cloud ecosystems to on-premises private clouds, a trend that is driving modernization. One example of this is object storage leveraging S3 and connecting with on-premises application modernization. This results in on-premises solutions resembling AWS and Google, a trend reflected today in many FileCloud customer engagements.
Another trend discussed is that CIOs are trying to gain more insights from existing content, including unstructured data. Historically, the latter has been more difficult and challenging in terms of extracting insights. However, customers now want a clear overview of the unstructured data within their enterprises and the ability to get meaningful intelligence from it. This is driving a further move toward a more homogeneous approach to organizing unstructured data within enterprise ecosystems.
The fact that remote working is now a fixed reality adds a layer of intricacy to these initiatives, as people need to access data to collaborate internally and externally. This increases the surface area to manage in terms of security. File organization is no longer just a conversation about admin, but also increasingly about data security. Threat actors are ultimately trying to access content, which is recognized today as the most valuable enterprise asset.
Enterprises can use AI to monetize the data in an enterprise ecosystem, leveraging the insights it offers. FileCloud regards AI as one of many tools that can be used to help solve specific challenges. However, its evolution is likely to occur with more speed than previous IT innovations. In general terms, FileCloud recognizes the importance of integrating AI into its product, but in appropriate, carefully thought-through contexts.
FileCloud recognizes that AI is useful for the classification of content that is broadly distributed in scenarios where compliance is vitally important. This includes government, industry, and region-specific standards related to handling sensitive data. Currently, admins often manually tag content or develop scripts for classification and analysis. However, LLMs now have the potential to perform these tasks: looking through content, tagging it appropriately, and applying the correct policies to the content.
Jason Dover also envisages AI providing the tools to leverage the FileCloud product to make smart decisions about the correct content to share, and with whom. As such, AI has a core part to play in the future of the company. Currently, FileCloud allows end users to connect their deployments to OpenAI. In the future, it will enable the use of on-premises LLMs by organizations that must retain all content within the bounds of their firewalls. Another necessary role of AI into the future is to fight fire with fire by outsmarting threat actors who are leveraging the technology, and thus further helping to safeguard customers' content assets.
Another potential role envisaged by FileCloud's CPO for AI is the use of on-premises AI-based services. This will entail distributed agents helping IT departments gain control. Currently, the content life cycle consists of a wide range of tools. Consequently, companies find it challenging to ensure the correct policies are applied when this content is shared.
CIO and CSO offices make sure enterprise data gets into the correct hands. Consolidation of data is crucial to such initiatives. Shadow IT is a major problem for many companies. Today, employees can easily send data to external services for processing without the knowledge of the CIO or CSO.
Dover discusses the potential to provide tools for data consolidation. AI may help achieve integration across the content life cycle. As such, it will have a role in ensuring the reasonable availability of content. Simultaneously, it will help handle risk with an overlay of governance, management, and awareness.
The potential of AI to quickly generate analytics from large data is also discussed in the podcast. Traditionally, companies needed to hire a team to gain insights from large data sets. However, this process may now speed up considerably. The prospect of extracting insights without the help of analysts and DBAs is another exciting future use of AI.
Jason Dover concludes the podcast with the insight that the integration of compliance, security, and the content life cycle will be a major feature of the future of IT. CISO offices now participate in conversations about content collaboration, which has historically not occurred. This comes from an increasing recognition that content is an enterprise's most valuable asset. Enterprises wish to ensure that the content collaboration system they choose aligns with the policies of their ecosystem and security risk tolerance levels.
Increasingly, organizations must pay attention to privacy and security regulations, or face financial and reputational implications. In addition, companies simply must be compliant with local laws if they wish to do business in any given region. Customers are often interested in integration with, for example, their SIEM systems, to detect early warning signs of problems such as ransomware. They also frequently wish to talk about integration with authentication and identity systems.
FileCloud's CPO predicts that in the future, customers will have the luxury of being less concerned about how their underlying ecosystem fits together. They will have more freedom to focus on finding the content that meets end user requests.
Security will be a core element of this scenario, as enterprises ensure that responses only go to those authorized to receive information. Getting to this point will take work, but it's the future of content collaboration.
Listen to the full EM360 Podcast here.
