Data center AI creates new risks

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in data centers to drive up efficiencies and drive down risks and costs. But it also creates new types of risks. This is one of the findings from Uptime Intelligence research report 25, Very smart data centers: How artificial intelligence will power operational decisions, published this month.

Some of these risks are not clear-cut. Take, for example, new AI-driven cloud services, such as data center management as a service (DMaaS), that pool anonymized data from hundreds or thousands of other customers’ data centers. They apply AI to this vast store of information and then deliver individualized insight to customers via a wide area network, usually the internet. But that raises a big question: Who owns the data, the supplier or the customer? The answer is usually both: customers can keep their own data but the supplier typically also retains a copy (even if the paid service stops, the data becomes an anonymous part of their data lake.)