Generative AI and how it is impacting businesses was a main theme at this year’s Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit. From using AI to improve cybersecurity to transforming how businesses interact with customers, AI is front and center on everyone’s mind.
The opening keynote talked about building cybersecurity resilience in the face of the explosion of generative AI for use cases and as a tool for threat actors to increase the complexity of attacks on businesses of all sizes.
While all technologies have both good and bad uses, AI has upped the game as hackers and nation-states intent on disrupting businesses are flooding people with more realistic deep fakes and overall cyber threats. One session showed examples of very realistic videos of a CFO asking an employee to transfer funds to a vendor. While videos are a little more challenging, fake audio and emails are easy to create and are challenging cybersecurity.
The other side of cybersecurity resilience is ensuring that people don’t burn out from doing their jobs. AI-based attacks and the need for businesses to innovate are causing more challenges in protecting sensitive data and overworked professionals can’t keep up. This results in more strain on security and privacy as organizations embrace AI and other advanced technologies to develop and deliver products and services faster. The need to collect and share a lot of user and customer data also stretches security because you need to guard against privacy violations.
By now most organizations have tried ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, to create marketing messages, write software code, or provide a better experience for customers. During the summit, companies talked about hundreds of projects using AI to do everything from scheduling travel to improving threat detection to quickly sifting through thousands of documents to find key information. As more companies integrate these technologies into their core business, challenges in protecting privacy and the security of sensitive data will appear.
At the Fasoo booth, a lot of people talked about the challenges of using AI to improve business, while ensuring they don’t compromise data privacy and security. Many people are still trying to figure out ways to enhance their business, but worry that overzealous employees will copy sensitive data into public services, like ChatGPT, to get their job done. While AI is a hot topic, many security professionals are still facing the basic problem of protecting their sensitive and regulated data from leaving the company. Ransomware, phishing, and AI-enhanced deep fakes prey on employees causing losses of sensitive data.
One executive from a manufacturing company talked about how difficult it is to manage all the systems to protect identity and data in so many places. She has one set of rules for her DLP system that alerts when sensitive documents are shared outside the company. Her business units want to use generative AI and she is looking into enabling that, but she needs to ensure sensitive data doesn’t leave the company. DLP doesn’t help because users are copying data from documents into ChatGPT and Copilot.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Many companies are building large language models (LLMs) as corporate knowledge shifts from documents and databases into LLMs. Using an LLM can help you get better answers to your questions about documents since we all use documents to capture and share knowledge. Adding corporate data into a model makes it easier to get business value out of existing documents by allowing users to “converse” with the LLM through natural language. By asking questions like “Summarize these two documents” or “Find the differences between these three contracts”, AI can increase productivity dramatically.
The challenge with any knowledge repository is you want to feed it clean or useful information. If you have obsolete or redundant data, your repository will have a lot of garbage. The same goes for data with no business value. Since businesses produce thousands of documents a day, odds are many of them are of little business value or the value decreases quickly over time.
Another challenge is deciding what is important and who should have access to sensitive data. Fasoo’s approach to providing clean data and limiting its access is to automatically encrypt sensitive files as users save them using Wrapsody. That action also saves them to a central repository guaranteeing the latest data is available. By also eliminating redundant, obsolete, and trivial data, your knowledge base is clean. Using an LLM to query this repository ensures you get the best answers to your questions quickly using data that is of business value.
AI–Ready Data Management and Governance
On Monday, June 3, 2024, Ron Arden, Executive Vice President, CTO, and COO of Fasoo, Inc., discussed leveraging AI effectively while safeguarding against intellectual property loss or privacy risks. Ron talked about how to optimize data quality, navigate cloud data migration challenges, and manage, control, protect, and audit your sensitive data at all times. He said that a good data governance program will get your data AI-ready.
Many companies are looking to move important data to the cloud, but worry about security and how to manage it. Visibility is lost if you rely on cloud providers to protect your data since you will have inconsistent policies across numerous platforms and locations. Ron showed how Fasoo solves that problem by providing an optimal solution for unstructured data management and security.
When users save documents, they are synchronized automatically to the cloud to make them readily available. Encryption is applied automatically and access control ensures unauthorized users cannot access a document. This maintains privacy and security for your sensitive data. AI allows users to get better business value from documents, by allowing them to ask questions in natural language and quickly surface the best data to meet a business need.
Another area Ron addressed is providing a safe environment to use generative AI services. Many executives worry that employees will share sensitive data with public services and compromise security, but they can’t just block access. People will always find a way to get what they need.
Fasoo provides a data security platform to control access to generative AI services and minimize the risk of data leaks by blocking users from entering sensitive data into the prompts. Using a deep learning algorithm, AI-R DLP can block users from entering sensitive data like credit card numbers, social security or insurance numbers, and even code snippets. It prevents leaks and even allows an audit trail of actions.
As more organizations embrace cloud platforms, they need to keep their data secure regardless of location. Ron showed how Fasoo solutions protect the data regardless of location, user, or platform.
Fasoo Approach Minimizes Your Risk
During the summit, a lot of attendees and analysts came to the Fasoo booth to understand how Fasoo’s AI-powered products and services can minimize the risks of AI, meet security and privacy regulations, and protect sensitive data from both internal and external threats.
One IT manager wanted an easy way to protect IP from going out the door when employees left the company and also needed to share sensitive information securely with customers. He liked how Fasoo could help with both in one solution.
Several visitors commented that Fasoo technology is very robust, balances security with usability, and integrates with an organization’s existing infrastructure. A common strategy is to make the technology almost invisible to users unless they try to violate a security policy. I remember one person saying, “I was a little skeptical during your presentation, but convinced once I saw it in action.”
