A Vision For The Future Of Enterprise AI Security With Sanjay Poonen

Danny Allan (0:00)

Am I correct in saying you have the largest set of data in the world as a company?

Sanjay Poonen (0:04)

Yeah, about 200 extra bytes, which is in our space, probably bigger by a factor of five than all of our competitors combined, protecting some of the largest companies, typically banks. Banks have a large amount of data, and by 25-27 percent of our revenue and customer basis banks, the world's largest banks are on our platform, and those people retain data forever. So a large amount of that bottom of the iceberg of secondary data in the world is in banks.

SPEAKER_3 (0:31)

You are listening to The Secure Developer, where we speak to industry leaders and experts about the past, present, and future of DevSecOps and AI security. We aim to help you bring developers and security together to build secure applications while moving fast and having fun. This podcast is brought to you by Snyk. Snyk's developer security platform helps developers build secure applications without slowing down. Snyk makes it easy to find and fix vulnerabilities in code, open-source dependencies, containers, and infrastructures code, all while providing actionable security insights and administration capabilities. To learn more, visit snyk.io/tsd.

Danny Allan (1:11)

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Secure Developer. I'm Danny Allan, your host, and I am very excited to be with someone that I've known for over a decade. He is an industry leader from Oracle to VMware to now Cohesity and Veritas. The acquisition that they made, but I'll allow him to introduce himself and that is Sanjay. Sanjay, maybe you can introduce yourself.

Sanjay Poonen (1:32)

Yeah, Danny, you got it all right, except it wasn't Oracle's SAP. It was a hard competitor for Oracle. But hey, I respect Oracle a lot. We partnered with them and did so and VMware, but you had it almost all right. Formative years was SAP, eight years where I was president and then CEO of VMware, where I was very fortunate to acquire your company and Peter, and got to know you and Destone, and you did really great things for us.

So, I'm very honored to serve on the board of Snyk, and I love the company and what you're doing for developers, what you're doing for security, what you're doing now in the world of AI. So, there's a lot we could explore and a lot of respect for also the customer feedback. Because we have, I mean, I'm in the security AI industry too at Cohesity now. We have some common customers who tell me about the experience of Snyk because they know I'm on your board, and they all have positive things to say about you.

Danny Allan (2:21)

Well, that is awesome. And let's start on the data side because obviously what you're doing at Cohesity and with the Veritas acquisition is protecting data. And I always say that data is the most important part of AI. Would you agree with that statement?

Sanjay Poonen (2:34)

Yeah, I'd agree. I mean, we think it is the gold of the new economy. All these companies that are ultimately trying to create value on top of whether it's larger LLMs, LLMs or the GPU stack. Ultimately, the value is the possession of data and that data ultimately. Even if you look at DeepSeek, part of the reason they're probably successful is because they are applying their algorithms to a ton of data that China has been assessing on it. So I think the companies like Amazon that have a lot of data, they can pour over in e-commerce models or Google. Then of course, what ChadGPT and others are driving, the more that you operate AI on data, the AI just gets better. Secure does the same way. The more you build malware detection, threat hunting, some of those capabilities on top of large amounts of data, it's a little bit like looking at disease in health. The more that you're able to operate your disease algorithms and large amount of diseases, everything gets better. So I think both AI and security, we're operating on large amounts. So in some senses, our mission at Cohesity has been to protect, secure and provide insights on the world's data. And given the fact now with our size and the acquisition of Veritas, we're the largest player and have a lot of enterprise customers, this process of AI and security and data has become very relevant.

Danny Allan (3:53)

So two questions on that. Because historically, when I look back at data, people would always train on the production data sets, the live databases and the live unstructured data. And there's always this promise of tapping the black data that, you know, all this data that was in these repositories that was locked up and unable to be used. Do you think that's going to change is my first question. In other words, you're going to be able to use the data protection, and the assets that you have have historically not on the production data to train on AI.