Pure Storage provides cloud storage systems to more than 11,000 customers. It uses artificial intelligence to help automate and enhance security, financial operations and product development. This article is part of the “CXO AI Playbook” – live talk from business leaders on how they are tackling this issue. Testing and using artificial intelligence.
For the “CXO AI Playbook,” Business Insider takes a look at mini-case studies on AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. We asked each of the featured companies to tell us about the problems they are trying to solve with AI, who makes those decisions internally, and their vision for using AI in the future.
Pure Storage has been providing cloud storage systems for over a decade and is trusted by some of the world's largest organizations, such as ServiceNow and Domino's Pizza. It uses generative AI to help make its 2,000 engineers more efficient.
Situation Analysis: What problem was the company trying to solve?
Pure Storage was founded in 2009 and, according to its website, serves more than 11,000 global customers. As a result, it has extensive institutional knowledge in providing data storage to businesses.
However, leveraging that knowledge across complex business processes has been a challenge, Ratinder Paul Singh Ahuja, the company's chief technology officer for security and networking, told Business Insider.
That will change with the mainstreaming of generative AI platforms in 2022. “I can see how this could be used in a number of business processes,” Ahuja said. “We've put together a company-wide initiative to do what we call an AI-powered enterprise.”
Ratinder Paul Singh Ahuja is the CTO for Security and Networking at Pure Storage. Courtesy of Pure Storage
Ahuja said the company looked at several options for deploying generative AI, such as using it to screen queries, support an internal help desk, or assist the company's financial arm.
But the most immediate improvement Ahuja wanted to achieve was to speed up and enhance the inspections conducted by his security team. He quickly touched on two key areas where AI can help.
Typically, its development, security, and operations program should undergo design discussions with company teams and try to find security issues to fix before products are released. It was arduous and time consuming.
Pure Storage's security team will also be inundated with threat announcements — when providers of hardware or software used by companies, including Pure Storage, announce that vulnerabilities have been discovered in their code that need to be fixed. But these reports are often for products that Pure Storage doesn't use or affect, so filtering ads is difficult.
Key employees and partners
The implementation of these uses of AI was led by Ahuja, who demonstrated early examples to the executive team at Pure Storage.
At Pure Storage, he said, the CTO office has more freedom and ability to explore new technologies than the IT department: “They kept it under the CTO office, as opposed to IT Services, just because the field is changing so quickly and we wanted to have the ability to not go through a process.” Strictly IT.”
Artificial intelligence in action
In its security department, Pure Storage now uses a generative AI tool trained using Ahuja's presentation slides and threat modeling knowledge — similar to the way a human employee is trained on best practices. “GPT can now be cut and pasted as an image of a design, or any documentation or code you've written, and it will go through the STRIDE methodology,” Ahuja said, referring to the standard threat modeling methodology that stands for spoofing. Manipulation, denial, disclosure of information, denial of service, and elevation of privileges.
Other Pure Storage teams, not just security, can use the software, meaning they don't have to wait for a security professional to be free to verify their plans.
A generative AI tool that scans massive amounts of threat announcements and warnings can quickly triage what human security professionals need to pay attention to and what they can ignore. The technology analyzes the threat feed and asks what category of system is affected and what signs to look for to detect the problem. “Then it queries our asset database and says, 'Do we have this category of systems?' Should I be worried about it?” Ahuja said. If yes, he said, it will continue the analysis until it is convinced it needs to be reported as a human.
Did it work, and how did the leaders know?
Pure Storage's AI model is designed to poke holes in new features, products or services, and check for vulnerabilities that cybercriminals could exploit. “What used to take a few weeks is now an hour-long job, with the robot guiding the different teams through the STRIDE methodology,” he said. “This is very popular with our engineering teams because they don't have to wait for a security expert.”
At the same time, the screening tool is so useful, Ahuja said, it's as if the security operations team has added another factor: “This is really powerful. You can't keep up with it. They were constantly under-resourced.”
What then?
Ahuja wants to layer AI on top of Pure Storage's products. “AI is really good at analyzing configurations — it's really good at generating code,” he said. “If you look at Pure Storage and a lot of other suppliers, we put out complex systems, and you have to configure them.”
He believes generative AI can help automate large parts of this process.
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