Companies must ensure data security when adopting AI tech

By Beatriz Marie D. Cruz, Reporter

PHILIPPINE COMPANIES should prioritize data protection as they continue to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and applications in their operations, technology company Cisco said.

“In the Philippines, like everywhere else, companies are under pressure from their boards to innovate, use AI to help automation, to help operations, to drive productivity, to give better intelligence, and to level up the capabilities that are delivered to their customers,” Dave West, president for the Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC) at Cisco, told ����ý in an online interview.

However, companies lack the necessary guardrails to protect their data while utilizing the productivity benefits of AI, he said.

According to Cisco’s 2024 AI Readiness Index, only 35% of Filipino respondents said they’re fully equipped to detect and prevent unauthorized tampering with AI.

Cisco last week launched AI Defense, a self-optimizing solution featuring safety mechanisms to secure and protect companies’ data as they adopt AI applications. The tool will be available to both new and existing Cisco users in March.

“AI Defense will just help protect that (data) and ensure that those guardrails are enforced,” Mr. West said.

“Companies can be successful in securing their data, their infrastructure, their people, and then making sure that whatever AI models they decide to use are providing the information in the right ways without bias, without toxicity and other things,” he added.

Raymond Janse van Rensburg, vice-president for specialists and solutions engineering for APJC at Cisco, said companies don’t need to sacrifice safety and security when adopting AI.

“So, for the foreseeable future, we’ll be living in a multi-model, multi-cloud world, and here’s the thing about models — by definition, they’re non-deterministic,” he said in a briefing. “You’re not always going to know what the output of a model will be.”

The ever-changing nature of AI models poses increased risks, Mr. Van Rensburg said.

AI Defense provides safeguards against the misuse of AI tools, data leakage, and increasingly sophisticated threats, Cisco said. It can also detect shadow and sanctioned AI applications across public and private clouds and provide model validation and runtime security.

The tool integrates with existing data flows and is built into Cisco’s cross-domain platform, Security Cloud. Splunk customers using AI Defense can receive alerts with additional context from across the entire ecosystem.

“Fused into the fabric of the network, Cisco AI Defense combines the unique ability to detect and protect against threats when developing and accessing AI applications without tradeoffs,” Cisco Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said.

Mr. West said companies need to invest in upskilling and in digital infrastructure to ensure that they can take advantage of the benefits of AI technologies.

“Digitization, skilling, understanding how to leverage AI, how to interact with different AI models and agents — all of that is going to be absolutely fundamental to the success of businesses and countries.”