As an increasing number of Chinese companies pursue data-centric decision-making at the heart of their business, cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies are expected to play a bigger role in today's data-driven economy in China, said a senior executive of United States-based data management service provider Commvault.

"China's economic scope is extremely wide, thus it has especially massive data volume to process and protect, which offers enormous opportunities to data companies," said Chua Chee Pin, area vice-president of Commvault Greater China, Japan, Korea and ASEAN.

Targeting the country's huge market potential, the company aims to tap into advanced AI technologies to help Chinese companies ensure, simplify and optimize data security and empower their business growth, it said.

"More and more Chinese companies are pursuing the goal of going global and overseas growth, and a huge number of their foreign counterparts are also making their foray into the Chinese market. Data protection and management embedded is indispensable in the process of their business transformation and digitalization," Chua said. "AI has a significant role to play in facilitating this process and can provide tailor-made data solutions adhered to evolving regulations and laws."

AI can be applied to raise the automatic level of data management, including optimizing the discovery and collection processes; facilitating data catalog; and reducing manual governance and monitoring of the database for a more stable, efficient and reliable management system.

"AI and machine learning algorithms are powerful tools to secure data safety and reinforce data protection in the face of cybersecurity threats and risks," Chua said. "The very advanced models are now incorporated into our solutions to help provide more efficient analysis and proactive moves on identifying vulnerabilities and ransomware attacks, as well as more intelligent solutions on the data restoration process."

As addressing security gaps faces both more opportunities and challenges when AI is involved, forward-thinking companies tend to explore methods for proactive data defense, advance ransomware protection and make data management a top business priority.

According to a report by US-based technology-focused investment firm Battery Ventures, data and security remain top spending priorities for enterprises, with 31 percent of respondents naming security as their number-one priority, and 62 percent expect their security budget to increase by as much as 10 percent in 2023.

"We are in an era where cyber threats are no longer stagnant — they constantly evolve. AI technologies have an edge in identifying typical attack behaviors before adding those into trained models. In this way, Commvault doesn't go on the traditional way of relying on existing virus databases and analyzing by comparing the threat with the databases," said Jason Dong, director of sales engineering at Commvault China.

"By contrast, we leverage AI models to detect threats more accurately and eliminate them in advance. Therefore, our customers can fill data safety gaps by taking proactive and efficient measures."

In the future, Commvault plans to incorporate more of AI/ML to further enhance the security and automation capabilities of its data protection systems. This includes leveraging AI to proactively monitor for emerging threats and realize a true multi-cloud automated recovery, Chua said, adding that the company remains a close partner with a slew of local cloud computing service providers, such as Alibaba Cloud and Inspur Cloud, to support Chinese market's digital transformation.

lijiaying@chinadaily.com.cn