Commvault’s Data Rooms for Easier AI Data Access | Tech Field Day News Rundown: November 5, 2025

Ransomware isn't paying so well and yet, NPM packages are full of ransomware. Call Weave Boosts AI Development while Intel opens AI showrooms Platform nine celebrates an an anniversary and Commvault makes data easier. All this on today's Tech Field Day rundown.

Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown, where each time we meet, we run down the IT News of the week with variable degrees of snarkiness. I'm your host Alistair Cook, and joining me on this special edition since well, my nor co-host Tom Hollingsworth is at Network Fields Day. Joining me is Jim Super.

Hi everyone. How are you doing today? Uh, good to see you all.

And by the way, today is National Donut Day. Quick fact, we used to have, uh, one of those Krispy Kreme donut shops right down the street from me here a few years back. It converted to a, uh, diabetic center.

So I presume there's some wisdom in that There's some poetic justice in the conversion. It's also American Football Day, which is a good way to burn off all of those excess calories. And exercise is one of the good preventative methods for, uh, the diabetes and similar things.

Yes, That's true. Yes. Ransomware payments are dropping sharply with only 23% of breach companies paying hackers in the third quarter of 2025.

This is the lowest rate on record, according to ware, stronger defenses, law enforcement pressure, and, uh, revised corporate policies are reducing our attackers leverage. While most ransomware now involves data theft and double extortion, um, companies are increasingly refusing to pay, causing average payouts to fall to just $377,000. Attackers like a carer and ki are shifting focus to medium sized firms that are more likely to pay while remote access compromises and software vulnerabilities are becoming the main attack methods.

Are we actually getting better at it and better at resisting that these a tax jump? Um, you know, I certainly would hope that, uh, the numbers seem to reflect that, but still almost $400,000 per incident. Uh, um, one of the interesting things in the report, Alistair, that I didn't see was, was there additional pushback from insurance companies, right?

Uh, having a have a bit of an insurance company background and having a spouse that started her second IT career at one, uh, you know, that results the idea of managing risk. Uh, and maybe that's also part of it too. The other interesting part of that article though, was that it's shifting towards much more remote access, uh, exploits.

So, you know, we're still talking about people, uh, uh, not having good personal security, uh, with the whole idea of bring your own device, uh, still happening and with the, uh, on slots still of people doing AI on their own personal computers, perhaps. Right? Um, maybe that's still a pretty rich, uh, target sphere and easy for people to penetrate.

So, yeah, just a fascinating, uh, down, you know, downturn and a good downturn for a change, but still kind of scary. NPM was hit by a phantom Raven attack with 100 plus malicious packages being downloaded 86,000 times. So what happened is hackers have flooded the NPM repository with over 100 malicious packages that have been downloaded, as we said, 86 K times according to security form coy, the campaign called Phantom Raven Exploited and NPM feature called Remote Dynamic Dependencies, which lets packages pull code from untrusted sites without detection.

The fake packages stole developer credentials and system data while hiding from security stands. Some of the malicious code even used AI generated names. Oh boy, big surprise.

Um, that, uh, appeared to be legitimate. And about 80 packages are still active, exposing some pretty major risks in the open source software security community. This is pretty concerning, isn't it?

Because you think as you are building your application, you're controlling your dependencies inside your application. Your CICD platform is pulling just the versions of software that you think you should be using. Well, NPM allows these, uh, remote dynamic dependencies that are one software package you've chosen to include pulling data out of some other location that is not the repository that you've originally looked at.

And this is the, the mechanism for getting in here. Uh, as, as soon as a package gets pulled in through these, uh, NPM repositories, uh, one of these hundred malicious packages, uh, now there's only 80 of them, uh, there, there're allowing Arbitrary code essentially to be pulled into your build environment and to run on your build servers and potentially then out into production servers. Although the discussion here is primarily about attacking your build servers and extracting information, developer information access keys may be for cloud services, those kinds of, uh, credentials that are being used to access other remote systems.

So pulling the contents of probably your software source code repositories out and, and sending them somewhere for an attacker to then use this is pretty horrific. It really is something that is a, an enterprise security company. Maybe I'm not wanting to use, uh, these public repositories where I have less control of where the, uh, the source code is actually being pulled from.

Maybe I want to be doing my own governance and pulling all of my dependencies on premises, scanning them for the presence of these remote dynamic dependencies, and making sure that we actually remove those, uh, only allowing packages that don't rely on remote dynamic dependencies, or at least remapping those dependencies to only in my own source code repositories. It is a bit of a concern then that I'd need to be using a full set of source code repositories that are managed and governed on premises. And this does put it out of reach for some smaller organizations that will wanna be very agile.

It puts it into that space of the enterprise companies building larger applications. Hopefully, NPM themselves will address this as well, and we'll add some methodology for denying remote dynamic dependencies, um, that would help us to then mitigate the risk that future repositories get added, that, that, again expose. Uh, 'cause of course, if you can add a hundred malicious packages into MPM repositories, you can probably add a hundred more and probably a thousand after that when you're good at, get good at hiding where your repositories are coming from.

And when your AI does a better job of not just obfuscating the names of these, um, repositories, but also obfuscating the vulnerabilities were in them while we're looking at cloud things. Amazon's latest survey that they definitely want to tell you is, is leading to more cloud usage is expecting that, uh, cloud hosted application use will grow from 59% of enterprises to 75% in a year. Uh, most organizations see public cloud as safer and better for compliance and on-premises according to AWS and multi-cloud use is increasing it.

Cloud and cybersecurity budgets are set to rise. Our budgets never rise despite ongoing data breaches. Companies are confident in cloud platforms to support security compliance and AI initiatives.

Jim, that you gonna bet the, uh, bit your future on the cloud. You know, it's interesting because I started out 25 years ago as a, a strict on-prem. This is when I get that part in there.

I, um, database administrator, right? Built the server from the ground up by myself. This drives the whole nine yards, right?

And when cloud really came about, I do a lot of work in, uh, you know, uh, not only Amazon, but also Oracle Cloud infrastructure, or OCI. Um, yeah, it's amazing to see the growth over time. And, you know, security from my perspective is really one of the selling points, right?

Um, the idea of having a centralized place to locate all of your security concerns, um, and to put all your eggs in that one basket and watch that one basket seems to make a heck of a lot more sense to me these days. Um, especially with all the exploits like we just talked about with MPM, right? Uh, open source software, yeah, it's free, but who has control of it?

Um, and depending on your vendor, your cloud vendor, generally, they've got a much better hand on what to look for security wise. So it's, it's not, I think, you know, Alistair not just, it makes sense to go to the cloud 'cause it's easier because it is, but also fewer potential people that could be compromised. So, yeah, I, I, I certainly see that.

And with the growth of ai, everything from generative to Ag agentic to whatever the next thing's gonna be, I think it's gonna make a heck of a lot more sense. Uh, I don't think it's gonna slow down. Core Weave acquired a company called Remo.

Hope I'm saying that right. An open source Python notebook for AI and data work create a complete platform for AI development. Reno's Notebooks will integrate with Core weaves, cloud and tools like weights and biases, helping developers move from experimentation to large scale deployment.

Uh, the Marino Notebook will stay open source and the acquisition builds on core reef's, recent deals to expand its AI developer ecosystem. Fascinating company Core Weave, but interested, what's your take on this? Well, firstly, I wanted to see a little bit more about Marmo and, and Marmo essentially is an alternative to using Jupiter.

Uh, it is more recently developed, maybe a little more, uh, interesting as a, a reactive, um, more visual tool for development, but it's essentially about developing new AI applications in a, a nice, easy way. What I like in this is that core weaves objective here is to help companies move from the experimentation phase of building their first couple of AI applications to running dozens, hundreds, potentially thousands of AI applications, AI agents, uh, in, in production. And, uh, Jim, you'll recall that AI infrastructure field, day three, the, uh, focus was very much on shifting from experimentation to production, and it is a difficult problem for organizations.

I applaud, um, applaud call we for addressing this along with a bunch of the other acquisitions that they've had recently, uh, other acquisitions they've had included, uh, buying monolith ai. There are a company that specializes in, uh, bringing AI to the physical world of building machinery and, um, dealing with engineering and physics problems, uh, as well as the, uh, open pipe acquisition for reinforcement learning tools around their open weights and biases as well. So, uh, there's a whole lot of nice pieces being built into the wider core weave platform is they try and stake a larger and larger space in the AI application development, and then AI application hosting.

That's where the payoff for them is make it easy to build these applications that will run on the call. We platform. Let's hope that their commitment to keeping Marmo open source and, uh, permissively licensed continues that other organizations will be permitted to use, uh, Marmo technologies as well as they wish to build out their own, uh, portfolios of AI applications.

Uh, as always with these acquisitions, it will be interesting to see whether that permissive license remains, uh, or whether a more restrictive license appears over time. It does seem like COR wants to have the majority of development of marmo remain community based development, and that minimizes their cost, maximizes the possibility that things will remain open, uh, as soon as they pull to largely internal development, then their costs will go up, and that's the point at which you'll see them switch to a different licensing model for the moment. Their, their approach seems to be really nicely open source Intel is launching some popup AI experience stores all around the world, New York, London, Paris, Munich, even Seoul, to showcase AI powered PCs.

Uh, visitors can try laptops from major brands, uh, and see Intel's upcoming PET for Lake processes in action, much focuses on gaming while so highlights AI applications in Asian non-English language, uh, in particular, the stores aim to boost brand visibility and demonstrate AI features and generate excitement ahead of Intel's next generation PC launch. I guess these experiences are all about helping their partners get out and get the idea that an AI PC is what you want. Jim, do you want an ipc?

Uh, no, not particularly. Uh, frankly, uh, I, I can, my first question is how do I turn it off? Probably, uh, but just my, as a creator, that's just my personal opinion.

Uh, but seriously interesting thing about, uh, Intel is, you know, you think they're, well, you know, they make chips, right? But, uh, the, the thing that was, uh, caught my attention was in Seoul, they actually are doing a Gangnam style type of rollout, you know, kind of to draw in perhaps a younger crowd or, you know, just even maybe being a little glitchy, if you will. Um, but it was really interesting that Intel, uh, is starting to put, uh, Panther Lake in action.

Uh, from everything I've read about them. Uh, it's a, an intriguing idea, uh, in terms of being able to utilize what we typically think of as crucial for ai. But there may be other types of applications that may well run extremely well, as you mentioned, gaming especially, right?

But we really don't know what the next generation of AI beyond generative and AgTech will bring, right? Um, you know, you may, you may be seeing people doing, uh, much more interesting types of open source experiments or even, um, you know, um, I recall when the Planetary Society had people use their laptops screensavers to, you know, home through data to look for, uh, if I remember correctly, uh, lunar samples, or even they were look, uh, some, uh, uh, cosmic samples and things like that. So, uh, uh, you know, it's very interesting to see where all this is gonna definitely, uh, head towards.

And the other part of Intel that I always found fascinating, I recently, I think within the past 15 months or so, they were at one of our TE Field Day events, and they were basically saying, uh, you know, you don't necessarily need a GPU to do a lot of the modeling that people are trying to do. So even though the GPU like features of Panther Lake might be really good for gaming or for visualization, or for other things, a lot of times, uh, with smaller numbers of, uh, dimensions of attributes of features that you need for a typical model, for a lower powered model, they may be just fine. So it's an interesting, uh, idea that we see coming forward with that.

Um, should be interesting to see what that brings even for people like me who are not particularly AI driven, um, just my own perspective. Platform nine has, uh, marked its first year of private cloud director, which is offering VMware users a simple and cost-effective private cloud solution that runs on their existing infrastructure. Uh, interestingly, it was built by former VMware engineers.

It helps enterprises modernize cut costs and migrate quickly. And, uh, one, uh, particular example use case was a Fortune 500 firm that moved 40,000 VMs at a fraction of the typical costs using Platform nine's, v jailbreak tool, clever marketing there, um, supporting both on-prem and, uh, SaaS options. It's providing a trusted, familiar path for VMware customers looking to maintain control efficiency.

Alistair, here we go again with, you know, uh, the fallout or the, the benefits, the right, whatever you wanna call it, from Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. Absolutely. There's been a lot of companies that have been looking at what are my alternatives to paying the increased price that VMware wants for VMware Cloud Foundation?

And my experience has been, if you're using the features of, of VMware Cloud Foundation, if you're using the the full suite, you're still getting great value as, uh, you a look at the new price. The, the VCF suite as a whole was underpriced previously, but if you're not using all the features, maybe that higher price for VCF isn't gonna to suit you. And this is where companies like Platform nine come into play, and Platform nine has, has been a long time friend of Tech Field Day, uh, cloud Field Day 21 is where they showed us private cloud director and v Jailbreak for the very first time.

And it was, it was, and remains a pretty impressive tool. I've looked at previous migration tools or previous migration processes. I did a, a customer study of a, a, a company that migrated from VMware vSphere on premises to another virtualization platform.

Uh, a couple of the things that are crucial in there is having good tools for that migration, and that's where, particularly the VJ Break tool really is very effective, uh, scales out scales to moving large numbers of virtual machines. That Fortune 500 customer, they priced their migration of those 40,000 VMs at $35 per vm. Now, this stands in contrast to the estimates that you see from, uh, other vendors or for, uh, in particular in the media.

Somewhere between $303,000 per VM gets floated as the number, depending upon how much fear and uncertainty you want in there. Obviously the devil is in the detail of how you account all of these things. If you want to inflate a number to say it's not worth moving, then you account a whole lot of things that maybe you wouldn't account if you wanted to say it was a good way of moving.

I've always liked Platform nine. I've been a fan of them for many years as, uh, they've done managed OpenStack, managed Kubernetes, and now managed private cloud. I really like their products, and we've, we've seen great uptake from, from customers.

And that that benchmark of moving 40,000 VMs at $35 per vm, that puts us very much in the wheelhouse of large organizations who have a lot of virtualization, but are just using vanilla virtualization from VMware. They would love to have, uh, the continuation of the, uh, vSphere alone licensing, but unfortunately, Broadcom is not looking to continue that. So they're looking at alternatives.

And Platform nine is probably one of the compelling alternatives we've seen. So great to see that success. And of course, I have a, a collection of friends who are part of the Platform nine team and, um, wishing them every continuing success.

Now it's time for us to take a closer look and we take a closer look at some innovations from Convault their data rooms, let data scientist teams quickly access and prepare backup data. Hmm. While using an AI powered interface that, that simplifies, uh, querying and managing this backup data for AI purposes, using data that's already being classified as it was ingested into the backup system.

Teams can reduce the manual preparation and apply role-based access control and sensitivity tags and shared data securely. Uh, the tool aims to speed up AI model training by letting, uh, the IT team who are already managing the data, managing some of the management tasks of that data, managing management, uh, and freeing up data scientists to focus on the focus on the analytics rather than the data preparation side. Jim, you're very much in the working with data, doing good things with data.

Would you like to be able to use the backup data repositories rather than the primary repositories For this? I think it's a fascinating idea. I, I wonder why no one has thought of this before, right?

If you have a database, you better be backing it up, right? And you better be also, by the way, testing your backups. But that's another topic for another day.

Uh, the key thing is, I'm surprised that it's, it's actually quite brilliant because you're gonna have to scan through that data, right? Depending on the type of backup you're taking. Uh, but generally, you know, a lot of shops, if they have, um, structured data especially, right?

Um, they, you're gonna be taking a full backup or some sort of, uh, you know, level zero incre, incremental level zero backup once a week anyway, you're gonna touch those blocks, right? So, um, you might as well go ahead and capture that. And if you're backing up, uh, object or file, you know, again, similar concepts, but different, so you're gonna touch the, the, the data anyway.

Um, one of the things that I still see organizations kind of struggling with is, well, how do we get value out of our structured data? You know, there's metadata buried in there, we got tables, we've got columns. Hopefully everything's described in some sort of master data catalog, right?

Uh, guess where that's usually stored? Yeah, inside the database itself, you're backing it up. Why not take advantage of the bandwidth that you're gonna expel your network bandwidth and everything else, uh, to do that backup, right?

So this is a fascinating idea. Um, again, like I said, I'm really surprised no one's thought of it before. Um, it, it would be interesting to see just how well this works and what they're able to capture in terms of, especially, I'm thinking the metadata more than anything else.

What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think the, the, there's an element here of building a data catalog and often we would see the data catalog being built in a data lake along with a, a read only repository of that data. And so we would often see this being another reason to make another copy of our production data in some location where we're gonna, maybe, I mean, taking the classic cloud methodology, we're gonna dump this into a whole bunch of object storage.

We're gonna have something crawl over that object storage, an updated database with metadata every time we ingest new data. Well, I've already got a place where I'm storing a copy, a read-only copy of all of this data, and that I also have version history over time because backup system does this data protection on a regular basis. So this is absolutely, uh, the, a continuation of the discussion that, that these data protection companies need or are moving beyond simple backup, moving towards trying to extract as much value as possible outta the data that resides in this backup repository.

That it's not just insurance, but it's actually usable data that we can then, uh, in this case expose through a model context protocol to allow easy consumption of that data in an AI application. Does then bring to, to mind that now my backup repository contains some primary data, not just protection copies, because of course, as soon as I'm grabbing that metadata, if that's stored inside my backup repository, how am I protecting that? Whereas my second and third copies and one of them off site, I, uh, is that metadata actually being stored out somewhere else?

Hopefully the metadata is being stored separately from the backup repository on a database server that I can then protect into that backup. Yeah, let's not get into a, a looping of our data as we're, uh, protecting it and then scanning the protection of our metadata about our protection. Um, somebody's slightly smarter than me has probably designed this, and so they've avoided that kind of looping problem.

But absolutely, I love when we see more value being delivered from the data that we are storing. One of the challenges here will be making sure that the backup systems performance suits the requirements of the application. That'll be consuming data from it.

Uh, it may well be that we'll see cing capabilities that layer on top of this that allow, uh, the, the actual AI application to be working with a, a high speed copy of a subset of the data whilst the majority of the data stays on a, a lower cost tier within the storage system. Lots of implementation details that will be fascinating to look at. And of course, uh, tech Field Day will be at Commvault Shift in a couple of weeks.

And what I imagine we'll be hearing some more about that other places, the Tech Field day will be, well, right now, this week, the reason Tom's not with us here today is that networking field, day 39 is happening. So today, November 5th and tomorrow November 6th, uh, is hosting Networking Field Day with a full delegate panel and an interesting collection of presenting companies. So make sure you take a look on the Tech Field Day website or watch on along on LinkedIn.

If you are, um, watching there. The following week, I will be in Atlanta for Tech Field Day at Kube Corn North America. So we will be, uh, live streaming on November the 11th from the event.

Again, I have, uh, some great sponsors there. I have South Works, I have, uh, VMware by Broadcom and I have, uh, traffic as well, uh, presenting lots to learn about those companies there. Uh, and again, tech Field Day website will show you all of these things.

Other things that we will come up with, well, tech Field Day Rundown will be here every Wednesday, so continue to, uh, catch us on YouTube or on your favorite podcast application. The Rundown is also streamed on Techstrong tv, and you can catch us on other Techstrong Future and programs. Uh, we'll be back next Wednesday to talk about all of the IT news of the week that was, and that's fit to print or at least to talk about.

Until then, for myself and for Jim and all of the tech fields, a team is wishing you and yours a great day.