Enterprises already protect a massive, ever-growing collection of files, emails, and work artifacts with backup. What’s been missing is an easy, affordable way to ask questions of that data—securely and at scale.
At CrashPlan, we’re working with Microsoft to make AI-powered natural-language search of enterprise backup data both scalable and cost-effective. The goal: turn your existing resilience investment into an always-on knowledge layer for eDiscovery, operations, and revenue teams.
Why AI matters
Backup data is more than a safety net; it’s a complete historical record of your organization’s knowledge, spanning endpoints, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and file servers. Unlocking it with AI can supercharge:
- Legal & compliance (eDiscovery): Ask natural-language questions to rapidly identify relevant custodians, files, and conversations, without rigid query syntax.
- Sales & Customer Success: Instantly surface every artifact linked to an account before a renewal, including documents, emails, notes, and shared files.
- Ops & security: Track changes, find needles in haystacks, and accelerate investigations with searchable context.
The catch? Traditional AI search stacks often rely on vector databases that balloon in size and cost at enterprise scale.
What’s new: a leaner path to AI search
By leveraging Azure services and a design that avoids database bloat, CrashPlan’s approach reduces the index footprint to a fraction of typical vector-store implementations—while still enabling fast, natural-language retrieval across protected data. The result is a path to broad, practical AI search that respects budgets and scales with your environment.
How it works (at a glance)
- Runs on Azure: Built to take advantage of Azure’s scalability, security, and AI services.
- Natural-language search: Ask questions in plain English; get precise, explainable results grounded in your protected data.
- Cost-efficient architecture: Minimizes reliance on oversized vector stores to keep TCO in check as data volumes grow.
Security, privacy, and control
- Zero-trust posture: Data remains governed under your security controls and tenancy boundaries.
- Granular access: Results respect role-based access and retention policies.
- Compliance-ready: Designed to support legal holds, defensible deletion, and audit needs.
Real-world outcomes
- Faster investigations: Shorten time-to-insight for compliance or security by querying the full historical record—not just what lives in production systems.
- Better renewals and QBRs: Give account teams instant context across years of artifacts, even if systems or owners have changed.
- Higher resilience ROI: Turn backup from “insurance” into an intelligence layer your teams use daily.
What’s next
This collaboration lays the groundwork for deeper integrations with Microsoft Copilot and other AI ecosystems, allowing insights from backup data to flow directly into the tools your teams already use for decision-making, compliance, and productivity.
Interested in seeing AI search in action? Stop by the CrashPlan booth #5652L at the Ignite Conference, and we’ll walk you through architecture options, data flow, and proof-of-concept steps.
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