- Pure Storage provides cloud storage systems to over 11,000 customers.
- It uses AI to automate and improve security, financial processes and product development.
- This article is part of “CXO AI Game Manual” – candid talks from business leaders about how they are testing and using AI.
For “CXO AI Playbook,” Business Insider examines mini-case studies of 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 is making these 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 make its 2,000 engineers even 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 customers worldwide. As a result, it has deep institutional knowledge in providing data storage to businesses.
However, using that knowledge in complex business processes was a challenge, Ratinder Paul Singh Ahuja, the company’s chief technology officer for security and networking, told Business Insider.
This changed with the popularization of generative AI platforms in 2022. “I could see how this could be used in a number of business processes,” Ahuja said. “We have an enterprise-level initiative in place to create what we call a generative AI-powered enterprise.”
Ratinder Paul Singh Ahuja is the Chief Technology Officer for Security and Networking at Pure Storage. Courtesy of Pure Storage
Ahuja said the company had considered several options for deploying generative AI, such as using it to sift through queries, supporting its internal help desk or helping the company’s finance arm.
But the most urgent improvement Ahuja wanted to make was to speed up and strengthen the checks carried out by its security team. He quickly identified two key areas where AI could help.
Normally, its development, security and operations program would go through design discussions with business teams and try to find security issues to resolve before deploying the products. It was laborious and time consuming.
Pure Storage’s security team is also reportedly inundated with threat announcements, when vendors of hardware or software used by businesses, including Pure Storage, announce that they have found vulnerabilities in their code that need to be fixed. But these reports often involve or don’t affect products not used by Pure Storage, so it’s difficult to filter out the announcements.
Key staff and partners
The process of implementing these uses of AI was led by Ahuja, who presented early examples to the Pure Storage leadership team.
He said that at Pure Storage, the CTO’s office had more freedom and ability to explore new technologies than IT: “They kept it under the CTO’s office, as opposed to IT, simply because the field is evolving rapidly. , and we wanted to have the possibility of not being rigidly framed by an IT process. »
AI in action
In its security department, Pure Storage now uses a generative AI tool that was trained with Ahuja’s presentation slides and knowledge of threat modeling – the same way a human staff member would be trained to best practices. “This GPT can now be cut and pasted as an image of a design, any documentation or code that you have written, and it will follow the STRIDE methodology,” Ahuja said, referring to a standard threat modeling methodology that stands for identity theft. tampering, repudiation, disclosure of information, denial of service and escalation of privileges.
Other Pure Storage teams, not just security, can use the program, meaning they don’t need to wait until a security specialist is free to review their plans.
The generative AI tool analyzing the vast volumes of threat announcements and warnings can quickly sort out what human security professionals should pay attention to and what they can ignore. The technician analyzes the threat feed and asks which system class is affected and what signs to look for to detect the problem. “Then it queries our asset database and asks, ‘Do we have this class of systems?’ Should I even worry about it? Ahuja said. If the answer is yes, he will continue the analysis until he is convinced that he should report a human, he said.
Did it work and how did leaders know?
Pure Storage’s AI model is designed to poke holes in new features, products or services, looking for weaknesses 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 solution is very popular with our engineering teams because they do not need to wait for a security expert.”
Meanwhile, Ahuja said, the triage tool is so useful it’s like the security operations team added another worker: “It’s really powerful. You couldn’t keep up. They were missing constantly in need of resources.”
And after?
Ahuja wants to integrate AI into Pure Storage products. “The AI generation is really good at analyzing configurations, they’re really good at generating code,” he said. “If you look at Pure Storage and many other vendors, we offer complex systems and you have to configure them.”
He believes generative AI can help automate much of this process.
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