Protect your AI Workloads to Drive What’s Next

As the world keeps turning, so do the minds of cybercriminals. As your AI infrastructure and critical workloads become central to your competitive edge, they become prime targets. Adversaries don’t take days off; they are patient and persistent with the goal of disrupting your business operations.

As AI investments surge, attackers are zeroing in on the most valuable targets: your models, your data pipelines and your recovery path. According to a Dell Technologies survey of 2,850 IT and business decision-makers, data security and privacy concerns are the No. 1 reported barrier to AI adoption.¹ My colleague Simon Jelley explored what many think is the safest move: prevention isn’t enough to keep your AI infrastructure moving forward.

Without a cyber resilience strategy in place, you could be exposing your AI data to threats and hindering your next wave of innovations. The good news? Dell PowerProtect Data Manager changes that equation, while clearing the path to accelerate What’s Next with confidence.

AI workloads: Becoming the crown jewels attackers want most

Traditional infrastructure can be rebuilt from a runbook. A fine-tuned AI model can’t. Think about what a trained model really represents: months of GPU compute, curated datasets and human judgment baked into weights and hyperparameters. These models are the engines behind your most strategic business capabilities, from customer intelligence and fraud detection to predictive analytics and automated decision-making. They don’t come off a shelf. They’re built, trained and refined over time using your proprietary data. That makes them irreplaceable. If they’re compromised, you don’t just lose capacity. You lose capability, institutional knowledge and the competitive edge that took months to develop.

Attackers know this. Their playbook targets backup and your trust in recovery first, neutralizing your escape route before encrypting production environments. And when it comes to AI, recovery order matters enormously. Each component of an AI application plays a distinct role:

• • • • Vector stores hold the indexed data your AI searches to generate relevant, accurate responses.
      • RAG pipelines (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) connect your AI model to live knowledge bases, enabling it to pull in current, context-aware information.
      • Model registries store the trained model files, version histories and the checkpoints that define how your AI thinks and behaves.
      • Training data and feature pipelines contain the curated datasets and transformation logic used to build and retrain models.
      • Inference serving infrastructure is the engine that runs your AI in production, routing requests and delivering outputs to users and applications.

These components are deeply interdependent. Restore one without the others, and your AI application won’t behave as expected. It may return inaccurate outputs, lose retrieval logic or fail entirely. A partial recovery isn’t a recovery. It’s a broken AI application.

Meet the platform built for this moment

PowerProtect Data Manager protects AI workloads as complete, coordinated systems rather than a loose collection of files and volumes. It captures the behavioral state of AI applications so that data, metadata, configuration and context are preserved together.

That means protection extends across the full AI workflow — from vector databases and RAG pipelines to model registries, fine-tuned checkpoints, training data, feature pipelines, inference services and the surrounding Kubernetes environment. Instead of restoring these elements in isolation, PowerProtect Data Manager helps bring them back in sync, preserving the relationships between them so outputs remain reliable and operations can resume with confidence.

And it doesn’t stop at AI. PowerProtect Data Manager also protects virtual environments, enterprise databases, file systems and cloud-native workloads across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. That’s complete business resilience, not just an AI safety net.

Paired with PowerProtect Data Domain, the platform delivers 75:1 data reduction,² up to four times faster restores,³ Zero Trust security and data immutability backed by Hardware Root of Trust. It’s the industry’s most secure backup foundation,⁴ purpose-built to keep workloads safe and recovery fast.

When you need an extra layer of protection, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery isolates your most critical data in an air-gapped vault, using machine learning to detect suspicious activity and ensure a clean recovery point is ready when it matters most.

Is your AI ready for what’s next?

Every breakthrough you pursue expands what your organization can achieve, and it widens the surface adversaries look to exploit. As AI becomes core to how you compete, the stakes rise with it: more data in motion, more systems connected, more value worth protecting. Protect what you’ve built and give your next breakthrough room to thrive.

Learn more about Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, partnered with PowerProtect Data Domain and PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, and help your organization build a robust cyber resilience strategy that will let you rest at night.