The world of computer storage used to be dominated by how quickly data could be imported or exported and in what quantities.

Those times have changed as cyber resilience and data protection become top-of-mind for most organizations.

“I think the speeds and feeds conversations are over in storage,” said Daneyand Singley (pictured, right), executive director of enterprise architecture and system sales at Mapsys Inc. “We’re now on what else storage can do for us. That’s where this whole cyber resiliency and cyber vault strategy comes from with IBM.”

Singley spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at IBM Storage Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Karen Hsu (left), vice president of storage ecosystem at IBM Corp., and they discussed how IBM’s storage offerings provide a range of data protection tools for enterprises. (* Disclosure below.)

Detecting data changes

In April, IBM added new features to its FlashSystem storage portfolio that included inline corruption detection. The enhancement leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning services to detect data changes that can be indicators of a threat or direct attack.

“Our ability to recover from a cyberattack in hours is something that nobody else can do,” Hsu said. “We’ve got inline data corruption detection that was recently announced and being rolled out and available. We’ve got these really key pillars that are there to help our clients be prepared and to identify a breach attack immediately and then be able to recover very, very quickly.”

Those key pillars encompass a number of protection capabilities that have been built into IBM FlashSystem products, according to Singley. These include features such as Safeguarded Copy, which isolates backup copies from production data so that if a breach occurs data can quickly be recovered and restored. Two-person authentication and ransomware detection features are also included in IBM’s storage array architecture.

“They’re built in there,” Singley noted. “There’s very little for you to do other than take the machine out of the box, put it in the rack, turn it on and start using it.”

Another consideration in today’s storage world is where data can be physically kept to meet information privacy requirements. Regulations such as GDPR in the European Union or CCPA in California have placed additional responsibility on businesses, and storage can play an important role in meeting compliance needs, along with defending against malicious threats.

“Our partners and our clients both want to be confident that IBM is able to meet any sort of regulations that are put in place by a local country,” Hsu said. “We have to make sure that we’re taking all of that into consideration when we’re developing our products, when we’re bringing things to market so that our partners and our clients have the confidence and the comfort level that we’ll be able to stand up to any of those threats.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Storage Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Storage Summit. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE