Kathy Gibson reports – Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving massive disruption in the IT world, with implications for security and resilience.
Time Pfaezer, GM and senior vice-president: EMEA at Veeam, points out that it is driving more and faster data exploits, while regulations are failing to stay current.
At the same time, up to 90% of AI projects are failing, with many of them guilty of exposing critical enterprise data.
“When it comes to security in the data centres, we are seeing the emergence of three gaps,” Pfaezer says. “These are a visibility gap; an AI trust gap; and a resilience gap.”
Organisations are struggling to find a balance: They want to quickly deploy new technology, using technology to increase efficiency and introduce new services. On the other hand, they need to maintain a good risk posture and observe good governance.
“Today, enterprises face a trade-off that shouldn’t exist: they can either move quickly and risk exposure – or they can play safe and fall behind,” Pfaezer says.
“The old rules say they have to choose. Our mission is to help them to accomplish both safety and scale.”
Veeam recently acquired Securiti AI for $1,75-billion and has integrated the technology to ensure clean data is used in trusted, resilient systems.
Together, Veeam and Securiti AI offer customers:
- Unified visibility across structured and unstructured, primary and secondary data;
- Continuous governance and compliance with identity-aware runtime enforcement;
- Zero-trust security and best-in-class resilience across production and backups;
- Guaranteed clean recovery of data, pipelines, models, and agents; and
- Trusted data pipelines to safely accelerate AI adoption enterprise-wide.
Mena Migally, regional vice-president: EMEA East at Veeam, explains that AI has moved AI governance to the top of many countries’ and companies’ agendas.
But the fear of missing out on the benefits promised by AI could derail resilience and governance efforts, he warns. “We are seeing huge AI uptake in every sector. And it’s not just the official projects, it’s the AI that employees are bringing into the company without approval from the IT organisation.
“But governance is not keeping up. Even organisations that know they need a governance model need to move faster.”
This means that security needs to shift from protecting the perimeter to protecting the data wherever it resides, Migally points out.
Brendan Widlake, regional director and country manager: Africa at Veeam, says South Africa and the broader African region are seeing massive changes in the threat landscape.
According to the Veeam Data Trust and Resilience Report, the top threat is still ransomware. The difference is that these attacks are often not for monetary gain, but to exfiltrate data. And, in Africa, attacks are accelerating.
Coupled with a skills shortage across the continent, many organisations are battling to respond.
Ian Engelbrecht, field chief technology officer: EMEA at Veeam, says the top priority for organisations is to build trust in the environment.
“When you are deploying AI, you need to be able to trust your data. Bad data is what makes AI act badly.”
At the same time, it’s important to secure identities – for people and AI. “In 2026, there will be 82 non-human identities for every human identity. You have to ensure they can all be trusted, and will do what they are allowed to do.”
These are the big issues standing in the way of successful AI adoption, Engelbrecht says. “Bad AI algorithms are typically built with bad data; o they fail because there is bad trust.”