AIOps: The Undeniable Paradigm Shift

AI has entered every aspect of today’s digital world. For IT, AIOps is creating a dramatic shift that redefines how IT approaches operations. On April 9, 2024, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will host a live webinar, “AIOps: Reactive to Proactive – Revolutionizing the IT Mindset.” In this webinar, Pratik Gupta, one of the industry’s leading experts in AIOps, will delve beyond the tools of AIOps to reveal how AIOps introduces intelligence into the very fabric of IT thinking and processes, discussing:

  • From Dev to Production and Reactive to Proactive: Revolutionizing the IT Mindset: We’ll move beyond the “fix it when it breaks” mentality, embracing a future-proof approach where AI analyzes risk, anticipates issues, prescribes solutions, and learns continuously. Read More

Edge AI Q&A

At our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies (CSTI) webinar “Why Distributed Edge Data is the Future of AI” our expert speakers, Rita Wouhaybi and Heiko Ludwig, explained what’s new and different about edge data, highlighted use cases and phases of AI at the edge, covered Federated Learning, discussed privacy for edge AI, and provided an overview of the many other challenges and complexities being created by increasingly large AI models and algorithms. It was a fascinating session. If you missed it you can access it on-demand along with a PDF of the slides at the SNIA Educational Library.

Our live audience asked several interesting questions. Here are answers from our presenters.

Q. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) what role will edge AI play? Read More

Confidential AI Q&A

Confidential AI is a new collaborative platform for data and AI teams to work with sensitive data sets and run AI models in a confidential environment. It includes infrastructure, software, and workflow orchestration to create a secure, on-demand work environment that meets organization’s privacy requirements and complies with regulatory mandates. It’s a topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) covered in depth at our webinar, “The Rise in Confidential AI.” At this webinar, our experts, Parviz Peiravi and Richard Searle provided a deep and insightful look at how this dynamic technology works to ensure data protection and data privacy. Here are their answers to the questions from our webinar audience.

Q. Are businesses using Confidential AI today?

A. Absolutely, we have seen a big increase in adoption of Confidential AI particularly in industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Government, where Confidential AI is helping these organizations enhance risk mitigation, including cybercrime prevention, anti-money laundering, fraud prevention and more.

Q: With compute capabilities on the Edge increasing, how do you see Trusted Execution Environments evolving?

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How Edge Data is Impacting AI

AI is disrupting so many domains and industries and by doing so, AI models and algorithms are becoming increasingly large and complex. This complexity is driven by the proliferation in size and diversity of localized data everywhere, which creates the need for a unified data fabric and/or federated learning. It could be argued that whoever wins the data race will win the AI race, which is inherently built on two premises: 1) Data is available in a central location for AI to have full access to it, 2) Compute is centralized and abundant.

The impact of edge AI is the topic for our next SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) live webinar, “Why Distributed Edge Data is the Future of AI,” on October 3, 2023. If centralized (or in the cloud), AI is a superpower and super expert, but edge AI is a community of many smart wizards with the power of cumulative knowledge over a central superpower.  In this webinar, our SNIA experts will discuss: Read More

Training Deep Learning Models Q&A

The estimated impact of Deep Learning (DL) across all industries cannot be understated. In fact, analysts predict deep learning will account for the majority of cloud workloads, and training of deep learning models will represent the majority of server applications in the next few years. It’s the topic the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) discussed at our webinar “Training Deep Learning Models in the Cloud.” If you missed the live event, it’s available on-demand at the SNIA Educational Library where you can also download the presentation slides.

The audience asked our expert presenters, Milind Pandit from Habana Labs Intel and Seetharami Seelam from IBM several interesting questions. Here are their answers:

Q. Where do you think most of the AI will run, especially training? Will it be in the public cloud or will it be on-premises or both Read More

Digital Twins Q&A

A digital twin (DT) is a virtual representation of an object, system or process that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning and reasoning to help decision-making. Digital twins can be used to help answer what-if AI-analytics questions, yield insights on business objectives and make recommendations on how to control or improve outcomes.

It’s a fascinating technology that the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) discussed at our live webcast “Journey to the Center of Massive Data: Digital Twins.” If you missed the presentation, you can watch it on-demand and access a PDF of the slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our audience asked several interesting questions which are answered here in this blog.

Q. Will a digital twin make the physical twin more or less secure?

A. It depends on the implementation. If DTs are developed with security in mind, a DT can help augment the physical twin. Example, if the physical and digital twins are connected via an encrypted tunnel that carries all the control, management, and configuration traffic, then a firmware update of a simple sensor or actuator can include multi-factor authentication of the admin or strong authentication of the control application via features running in the DT, which augments the constrained environment of the physical twin. However, because DTs are usually hosted on systems that are connected to the internet, ill-protected servers could expose a physical twin to a remote intruder. Therefore, security must be designed from the start.

Q. What are some of the challenges of deploying digital twins? Read More

A Q&A on the Impact of AI

It was April Fools’ Day, but the Artificial Intelligence (AI) webcast the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) hosted on April 1st was no joke! We were fortunate to have AI experts, Glyn Bowden and James Myers, join us for an interesting discussion on the impact AI is having on data strategies. If you missed the live event, you can watch it here on-demand. The audience asked several great questions. Here are our experts’ answers:

Q. How does the performance requirement of the data change from its capture at the edge through to its use

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How AI Impacts Storage and IT

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have had quite the impact on most industries in the last couple of years, but what about the effect on our own IT industry? On April 1, 2020, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will host a live webcast, “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Storage and IT, where our experts will explore how AI is changing the nature of applications, the shape of the data center, and its demands on storage. Learn how the rise of ML can develop new insights and capabilities for IT operations. In this webcast, we will explore: Read More

AI, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing in Action

SNIA Cloud Storage recently hosted a fascinating webcast on the real world use of IBM Watson – the computer that mesmerized viewers on “Jeopardy!” by answering questions accurately and faster than its human competitors. Our webcast, “Customer Support through Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning,” detailed how Watson is being used as a virtual support assistant, named Elio, at NetApp. We had many interesting questions during the live event which is now available on-demand. Here are answers to them all from our expert presenters who have been driving the success of Elio – Ross Ackerman from NetApp and Robin Marcenac from IBM. Read More

Watson: From Jeopardy! to Digital Support Assistant

When IBM Watson premiered on “Jeopardy!” viewers were mesmerized by Watson’s ability to answer the quiz show’s questions and most times, beat the human contestants! Fast-forward to today and the real-world applications extend well beyond playing trivia games. Watson is being deployed in a variety of medical and business scenarios.

In fact, NetApp is now using Watson as part of Elio, a virtual support assistant that responds to queries in natural language. Elio is built using Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities which enable Elio to analyze unstructured data, by using natural language processing to understand grammar and context, interpret complex questions, and evaluate all possible meanings to determine what is being asked. Elio then reasons and identifies the best answers to questions with help from experts who monitor the quality of answers and continue to train Elio on more subjects. It’s a fascinating application of artificial intelligence (AI) that we will discuss in detail at our SNIA Cloud Storage webcast on February 22, 2018, “Customer Support through Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.”

Elio and Watson represent an innovative and novel use of large quantities of unstructured data to help solve problems, on average, four times faster than traditional methods. Join us at this webcast, where those on the front lines of this innovative application will discuss:

  • The challenges of utilizing large quantities of valuable yet unstructured data
  • How Watson and Elio continuously learn as more data arrives, and navigates an ever growing volume of technical information
  • How Watson understands customer language and provides understandable responses

Learn how these new and exciting technologies are changing the way we look at and interact with large volumes of traditionally hard-to-analyze data. Register now! We look forward to seeing you on the Feb. 22nd.