With Ada Lovelace Day the inspiration for this special episode, we actually go on a journey beyond into'the how' of embedding diversity, equity and inclusion by design, and in these ever evolving times, how to better embrace change too. To do so, I am joined by the brilliant Isabelle Guis, Chief Marketing Officer at Commvault, who has a truly fascinating personal journey to share - I am sure it will inspire many! We cover the holistic skills that matter most today and into tomorrow including STEM and STEAM, growing through discomfort or'feel the fear and do it anyway', mottos for professional and personal life, the power of mentoring and sponsorship and so much more, packed with real life examples. And beyond this still, we explore the power of protection for data which alongside trust, must be the biggest currency of our times sharing security examples from Commvault and looking ahead to their Connections 2022 event on November 2nd and 3rd. This is a superb technology, learning and networking opportunity, freely available to all, that can help everyone to innovate with confidence.

One of the most important things a business can do when its using AI products or creating custom AI projects is to make sure all the relevant data can be used as inputs. AI and machine learning are hungry for data and work best when the algorithms are using large datasets. The predictions generally become stronger the more data with important signals there is to work with. But wrangling and assembling all the data is difficult: in most projects, whether AI or analytics-focused, it's a huge undertaking to assemble all the data needed. This has never been truer than now, in the era of big data, when companies have so many data sources and formats to work with.

It's a bad news, good news situation for system administrators worried about the reliability of backing up data from cloud computing systems. The bad news is backup software for cloud data is only about half as mature as traditional versions, Commvault chief strategy officer Chris Van Wagoner said. The good news is some exotic technologies such as artificial intelligence may bridge the gap. "I don't want to poke fingers at any cloud providers because I don't care who you are--they all experience outages from time to time," Van Wagoner observed, reflecting on the recent major outages at Amazon and Microsoft. "One of the areas that everybody can do, including us, in the old legacy [backup] world is cross-platform, cross-application, cross operating system," he said.