In this fast-paced global economy, enterprises must innovate to evolve and succeed. Today’s industry experts are seeking transformative technologies—like high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI)—to help them accelerate data analytics, support increasingly complex workloads, and facilitate business growth to meet the challenges of tomorrow. However, data security remains a chief concern as enterprises race to implement these cutting-edge innovations.
The digital age is marked by several key trends—including IT modernization, business transformation, and digital disruptions such as proliferating mobility, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and much more. Many businesses are investing heavily in these opportunities in order to achieve superior levels of performance and competitive advantage.
Data volumes continue to soar as an increasing number of intelligent machines, computers, cell phones, and personal devices connect to the Internet. Enterprises are moving quickly to process and analyze this data to empower more informed, data-driven decision-making. According to a 2016 IDC report, worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics will grow from $130.1 billion in 2016 to more than $203 billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 11.7%. As a result, the market for big data and business analytics solutions is projected to reach more than $95 billion in 2020.
Yet with growing opportunity comes growing risk.
COMBATING CYBERSECURITY THREATS
Cybercrime is the greatest threat in the digital age. As businesses of every size and industry process and share data across a variety of vulnerable endpoints, they are experiencing a rising number of breaches that result in critical data loss as well as millions of dollars in liabilities. In fact, more than 50% of cybersecurity professionals reported at least one incident of malware in 2016, and more than 500 million records were breached in the first half of 2016 alone. Now more than ever, cyber criminals are targeting enterprises with massive and highly valuable Big Data sets, making cybersecurity vital to running a safe and effective business.
In order to survive, IT departments must adopt only those HPC technologies that ensure their IT environments remain fast, flexible, and secure for their simulation, modeling and analytics workloads. HPC solutions need to allow businesses to safeguard highly sensitive data, from the moment it is generated and analyzed to the moment it is accessed across the network, transferred to the data center, archived, or deleted.
All types of organizations—ranging from government and academia to commercial—need a secure and resilient platform that delivers optimal performance, supports high-density workloads, and provides comprehensive server security without compromising application performance. The leading HPC platforms such as the world’s most secure industry standard server with its unique Secure Compute Lifecycle approach features the right combination of performance, scale, and efficiency, together with comprehensive security features embedded in the firmware to ensure businesses can harness the full power of their data. In addition to dramatically reducing their vulnerability to a security breach, it can also rapidly recover the system and data in the event of a breach.
INNOVATING FOR A SECURE FUTURE
In addition to the latest embedded firmware security capabilities that empower users to confidently secure their HPC clusters, many businesses are further innovating by leveraging AI capabilities to identify, predict, and even prevent cybersecurity attacks. By investing in Deep Instinct, a startup that uses deep learning, a subset of AI, to combat cyber threats, NVIDIA is striving to make failsafe security a reality. In fact, customers who implement their industry-leading deep learning technologies can defeat 99% of cybersecurity threats. This includes both malware and attacks against the system.
While GPU-accelerated computing helps to optimize key processes such as deep learning and data analytics which ensure fast and efficient business operations, adding security capabilities based on deep learning techniques enhances cybercrime detection and prevention. GPUs also speed up data center workloads, allowing users to improve data management across the network, reduce time to insight, and combat ever-evolving security risks. As the adoption of HPC and AI applications accelerates in commercial enterprises, the need for advanced security capabilities will grow increasingly important.
To learn more about how HPC servers and how advanced data center solutions are mitigating cybersecurity threats, I invite you to follow me on Twitter @Bill_Mannel. You can also follow @HPE_HPC and @NVIDIAAI for the latest news and updates in HPC and AI innovation.