Artificial intelligence has become virtually essential for an enterprise market grappling with big data and multicloud, but some businesses maintain concerns around security and job availability with the new automated solution.

New offerings from IBM are designed to address these issues for increasingly complex digital environments, according to Eric Herzog (pictured, left), chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels at IBM, and Sam Werner (pictured, right), vice president of storage and SDI software at IBM.

Herzog and Werner spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed how IBM’s new AI solutions are helping customers overcome existing challenges and future proof their digital strategies. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Vellante: You guys have done some work in multicloud. [Is there] some research that you can share with us?

Herzog: Our Spectrum Protect modern data protection product has about 350 small and medium cloud providers across the world that use it for their back up as a service. We found in a multicloud survey [they] use a minimum of five different public cloud providers. Hybrid is a subset of that. They’re using between five and 10, not counting software as a service.

Vellante: Do you see customers starting to think about a multicloud strategy? What’s behind that, and what are you guys doing from a software standpoint to support that?

Werner: In the storage space, we find customers trying to come up with a data management strategy in a multicloud model, especially as they want to bring all their data together to come up with insights. As they build an AI strategy and extend what they’re doing with analytics to get value out of the data, they’re building a model that’s able to consolidate the data, allow them to ingest it, and then actually build out AI models that can gain insights from it.

For our software portfolio, we’re working with all the big cloud providers getting our software out there and giving our customers flexible ways to move and manage their data between the clouds and also have clear visibility into all the data.

Vellante: What [is] the catalyst there?

Werner: There’s absolutely IT realizing they need to get control over this again and all the new regulations. [General Data Protection Regulation] has had a huge impact. These IT organizations need to track the data and be able to take action on it, and now you have all these new roles in organizations, like data scientists who want to get their hands on data.

The other thing you’ve seen is the rise of the vulnerabilities, more public attacks on data. You’ve seen C-level executives lose their jobs over this. There’s a lot more stress about how we’re keeping all this data safe.

Miniman: Tell us what’s different about AI in storage than the intelligence, and what’s the latest about how AI fits into the portfolio?  

Werner: We’re building AI in that can predict failures before they happen so that our storage never takes any outages or has any downtime. By looking at behavior out in the network, we can predict or identify issues that a host might be causing on the network and proactively point out exactly which host is causing the problem.

Miniman: How are enterprises getting over that fear [of] losing [jobs]? We can’t not put automation with the scale and how things are moving, but what’s the reality out in the field?

Herzog: They are managing more storage every year with essentially the same people they had in 2008 or maybe a tiny bit more. There’s absolutely a shift in the skills. People who are managing the infrastructure have to move up and move towards coding and automating the infrastructure. As the amount of data grows, it becomes too difficult to manage it in the old manual ways of doing it.

You need automation and intelligence in the storage infrastructure that can identify problems and readjust. In our storage infrastructure, we have automated data placement that puts it on the correct tier. That used to be something a storage administrator had to do manually. Now the storage can do it themselves, so they need to move up into the automation stack.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE