Ep. 238 How Federal Agencies Can Achieve Cyber-Resilient Data Protection and Recovery

AFCEA’S TechNet Cyber conference held in Baltimore, Maryland was the perfect opportunity to sit down with Greg Carl, Principal Technologist from Pure Storage.

Pure Storage is used by 175 federal agencies.  Time to sit down from a subject matter expert and explain their value proposition.

Today’s federal government is attempting to accomplish digital modernization through a move to the cloud and, at the same time, reduce staff.  To multiply the risk associated with this endeavor, we see an increase in cyber attacks on data at rest, in transit, and while in use. 

Greg Carl drills down on how Pure Storage can help federal leaders in several areas, he begins with Retrieval Augmented Generation, RAG.

People have jumped into AI without knowing how to structure a large language model, the popular LLM.  RAG focuses on text generation and tries to make sure the data collected is accurate, relevant, and contextually aware.

Pure Storage asks, if RAG protects the results of a query, what protects the “Retrieval” part of RAG.  We know LLMs are being attacked every day.  Malicious code could be placed in a LLM, and the RAG system might not know.

A decade ago, backups were child’s play.  A server down the hall, a backup appliance.  Today, one needs an agile cloud solution to perform continuous backups in a hybrid world.  One way to gain resilience is to use immutable backups where the attacked system can be restored and not lose valuable time.

Speed and security handling important data activities can reduce costs for federal leaders by improving accuracy of LLMs and speed the time to recover after an attack.

Connect to John Gilroy on LinkedIn   https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gilroy/

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