Perhaps the biggest barrier to digital transformation has been the humble data silo. After years of experimenting with middleware to link disparate datasets, cloud and as-a-service applications created many new barriers.
The rapid emergence of practical artificial intelligence applications has exposed the problem of the data silo. Any organisation hoping to take advantage of AI must dismantle these barriers quickly – or risk losing ground to better-prepared competitors.
A common operating environment is just table stakes
The solution to dismantling all of these barriers is to introduce a new common operating environment, like NetApp. This will allow you to integrate operations across all major cloud providers. With a common control plane, it becomes easier to build artificial intelligence applications that can exploit each platform’s strengths.
However, the common operating environment is the very least every business needs. The reality is that future-ready AI apps will require much more.
Mobility as standard
What works for you today may not be suitable tomorrow. Cloud providers constantly add and remove functions and features that your AI applications rely on. Portability will be essential, allowing you to move classify, access, move and serve workloads from anywhere in your multi-cloud environment.
Given the complexity of such manoeuvres – and the time-critical nature of line-of-business applications – AI-optimised tools will be essential.
Optimised resource usage
The resource usage billing model is an excellent way to control capital spending – and to potentially blow your budget. AI and machine learning are resource-hungry, so you will need a platform capable of allocating and reallocating workloads to optimise GPU utilisation – automatically.
GPU allocation is critical model training – after all, the faster you can train your model, the faster you can productionise your model. Applying a data reduction ratio, like that provided by NetApp will further accelerate training, ensuring only relative information is ingested and processed.
Properly protected data
Whether used for machine learning, AI analytics or line-of-business operations, data is the lifeblood of your business. Lose access to your data because of ransomware and the impact could be catastrophic.
This threat keeps CTOs awake at night. The only way to avoid this problem is to choose a common operating environment that offers integrated immutability. Read-only datasets cannot be corrupted, protecting data – and the applications that rely on it. NetApp even offers a Ransomware Recovery Guarantee to back their immutability technology, ensuring your business is protected at every level.
For additional protection you will need to enable versioning and traceability, allowing you to meet compliance and responsible AI practices.
The choice of platform is critical.
As you can see, effective ML and AI require more than ‘just’ data. Your choice of infrastructure will be critical to making data available.
To learn more about how NetApp can transform and accelerate your machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts, please give the WTL team a call.