How does AI impact data protection?

The weekly newsletter of the Business of Tech, giving you new insights into the world of IT service delivery.

Looking for stories from the podcast stories? Check out the pod itself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or daily in your inbox. Stories are available to everyone for five days,and Patreon supporters forever.

Was this forwarded to you? Join the list!

How does AI impact data protection?

Companies old and new recognize the value of infusing AI into products. As the field evolves, a divide seems to be appearing between the legacy companies adding AI to their offerings and new startups nipping at their heels by starting product development with AI.

I wanted to talk to one of these newer companies, so I invited Niraj Tolia to a recent bonus episode of The Business of Tech. He’s the CEO of Alcion, which focuses on addressing the securing challenge of data protection for Microsoft 365 through – you guessed it – AI.

Curious if you can enhance your services by replacing legacy tools with AI-enabled solutions? Here’s Tolia’s take on how fresh new products can unlock value-added services.

The Promise of AI for MSPs

Remember a year ago when everyone was worried AI would replace tech service providers? Tolia does, and he’s glad that narrative has faded away. He sees AI as an amazing opportunity for MSPs, as long as they’re asking themselves the right question:

“How do I replace my legacy tools with AI-enabled tools so that I can do a better job and focus on the things that I really care about, which are my end customers, my professional services, and their digital transformation?”

He’s obviously team new-tool, but I agree that regardless of newness, AI should only elevate our position by reducing operational toil.

Legacy Versus New Solutions

But it would be tough to deny that legacy players are some of the leaders in bringing AI to market. There’s a solid argument that most providers can expect their existing toolkit to get an upgrade that includes AI, so I asked Tolia to explain his thinking on legacy v new solutions.

He described the rush of AI into existing tool stacks as AI washing – it may say AI, but it’s really more of a “demo quality” with some flashy statistic-focused features.

Instead, new companies like his started with a blank slate, allowing them to purpose-build their AI solution from the ground up:

“It’s like building a house now versus building a ranch a hundred years ago; construction techniques have changed a lot. And that’s the analogy I would draw here. Yes, they’re doing it, but applying AI in a domain-specific manner is a lot more involved than saying, let’s add an LLM to my product,” he said.

What AI Brings to the Table

I asked Tolia for a more concrete illustration, specifically with backup data. What does AI bring to the table when you infuse it into backup technology?

For context, this is Tolia’s bread and butter; he has a PhD on the subject and has focused on it throughout his extensive entrepreneurship career.

AI came into the picture for him because he kept running into the issue of a rapidly changing cyber climate. The issue isn’t just a failing disk drive anymore – it’s now malware and ransomware targeting every type and size of business. He settled on the belief that the only real way to tackle those issues in data protection is by using AI and that legacy solutions just weren’t cutting it anymore.

For the end users, he summarizes AI’s benefits quite simply: improved security. His company has multiple AI models that specifically learn to detect anomalies and strange versus novel behavior – features he doesn’t think would be possible without AI.

For MSPs, he summarizes AI’s benefits as a major reduction in operational time:

“In a thousand-person office, you can never set up a manual schedule per person to back up when they’re the most active and when they’re modifying the most data. But our system can do it for our customers; you don’t need to worry about scheduling anymore. You don’t need to worry about reliability. We figure out when the best time to do it is, when to retry something, and how to auto-remediate some issues,” he said.

Balancing Transparency and Automation

The main drawback that came to mind for me is that with solutions like his, you’re removing some of the ability to provide insight into what happened. Less exposure can be a good thing, but how does Tolio think about that balance?

In short, he doesn’t see it as a major problem because you can still go back and get that control when you need it. And if the goal is to reduce day-to-day complexity, it’s worth considering that only a small number of people typically need to access that level of control, making overall separation from the source a net positive.

Moving forward, he thinks the process of tracking down insights will be as easy as asking the AI via chatbot:

“All these insights are so you don’t have to build for the entire universe and burden a system with complexity. You can have it be a little bit more freewheeling, which is usually what customers want,” he said.

The Data Hurdle

Tolia has also given some thought to how leaders can optimize their relationships with data to enhance its overall value.

The first point he shared was the ongoing importance of privacy and security. AI features may be great, but they aren’t worth it if data accidentally leaks across customers or an LLM exposes sensitive info. That’s why Alcion only trains customer-specific models without sharing data between partners.

The next level of consideration he wants MSPs to consider is what to do from an API programmatic lens. In his own words:

“For example, we have a partner dashboard in a system. But what if there’s a new use case, right? It’s all under the customer and partner dashboard, it’s the same API. So then how do you expose a programmatic interface that allows AI-related tools to interact with APIs?”

Finally, as AI tools evolve, he encourages everyone to think about how to improve the way we talk to data. He and his team are actually working on that type of insight-focused interface right now.

Of course, most organizations are pretty sloppy when it comes to data. To wrap up our convo, I asked for a quick overview of the process of working with Tolia’s company from a data handling perspective. He described it as an 80-20 testing process; partners can get about 80% of the AI’s benefits from doing about 20% of prep work. His team handles the bulk of the onboarding so customers can get a sense of the tool’s worth before investing further.

What do you think of the tension between new AI tools and AI upgrades from legacy companies? If you’re on the fence or committed to team new-tool, you can learn more about Tolia’s work at www.Alcion.AI.

As always, my inbox is open for stories, questions, or whatever else is on your mind.

More from MSP Radio

Missed Things?

How about our latest videos to catch you up?

The Daily Podcast available as videos

Driving Business Outcomes with Identity Solutions: Insights from SailPoint and IDMWorks

The Walls Have Eyes: Exploring Border Technologies with Petra Molnar

From Software Development to Cybersecurity: A New MSP’s Journey with Nerds to Go’s Paul Ongioni

Exploring AI Trends with Yusuf Khan, Head of Data Science at Constellation

Service Leadership Profitability Report: Trends & Business Models with Peter Kujawa

Data Security, AI Governance, and Data Management in SaaS and AI Applications with Yasir Ali

Want the Daily News?

All the stories from the daily Business of Tech Podcast are available in the daily digest, and stories are available to everyone for the first five days, and Patreon supporters forever. Catch the audio of the show anytime on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find podcasts. Links at businessof.tech

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.