Striking the Balance Between Security and Productivity
As organizations grapple with the rapid adoption of generative AI, a critical shift is occurring in how they approach security. The traditional stance of restricting access to new technologies is proving ineffective in the face of generative AI's widespread availability, appeal, and utility. Employees, driven by the promise of increased productivity and innovation, are using these tools regardless of official policies, introducing a host of organizational challenges that stem from the subsequent lack of control, visibility, and strategic implementation.
This reality is prompting companies to reconsider their strategies. Instead of fighting an uphill battle against adoption, many organizations are exploring effective ways to securely enable the use of generative AI. In this blog, we’ll explore how this “security through enablement” approach works, its benefits over restrictive policies, and why it's becoming the preferred path for enterprises aiming to harness AI's power while maintaining robust security measures.
The Security Conundrum
Generative AI's ability to process and generate vast amounts of data raises legitimate concerns about data privacy and security. Organizations are justified in worrying about the potential exposure of sensitive information, intellectual property risks, and the challenges of maintaining data governance in an AI-driven environment.
As a result, companies have responded by implementing restrictive policies, limiting or outright banning the use of generative AI tools. However, while well-intentioned, this approach often proves counterproductive, leading to a rise in Shadow AI and its attendant consequences, including:
- No control: Organizations lack the ability to manage what data is shared, by whom, and with which models, increasing the likelihood of exposure and inappropriate sharing of sensitive data
- No observability: Without visibility and monitoring capabilities, security teams are missing critical data needed to understand and enforce policy compliance, analyze user behavior, assess threat exposure, and respond to incidents
- No insight: The inability to uncover high-value use cases means organizations cannot effectively proliferate transformative solutions across the enterprise
The Power of Enablement
Because of these challenges, more and more organizations are now taking a different approach. Rather than seeking data protection through restriction, they're achieving a more effective security posture by providing users with secure, sanctioned access to the generative AI tools they want. This strategy of security through enablement offers several key advantages:
- Prevent Shadow AI: By empowering employees with secure access to generative AI where and how they want it, organizations ensure their teams are fully supported, reducing the inclination to seek alternative solutions
- Proactive risk management: With sanctioned tools, organizations can implement preemptive security measures, reducing the likelihood of sensitive data leaks or misuse
- Enhanced control and visibility: By managing access and usage, enterprises can control how sensitive data is treated in generative AI interactions, and gain better insights into how these tools are being used
- Increased productivity and innovation: Employees can leverage this powerful technology to work more efficiently and creatively
- Competitive advantage: Successfully integrating generative AI can help organizations stay ahead in their industries
Security and Productivity in Perfect Harmony
Security through enablement is rapidly emerging as the leading approach for organizations looking to maintain a resilient risk management strategy in the generative AI era. By providing the safe access employees want, enterprises can empower their workforce without compromising on data security.
Liminal is the most secure, most flexible, most productive, and most cost-effective way for organizations to securely enable generative AI. With Liminal, enterprises can safely equip employees to experience the productivity benefits of generative AI across any website, application, and platform, while providing unparalleled data protection, observability, and governance capabilities.
Built to deliver robust security and a delightful user experience in perfect harmony, Liminal provides organizations with unlimited, secure access to the leading AI models and brings custom, model-agnostic assistants to wherever work gets done. With accurate, intelligent data protection, granular role and model-based access controls, IdP integration, advanced logging and exporting to SIEMs, and a host of additional governance features, organizations can leverage AI with total confidence.
Getting started is easy, and deployment can be completed in under an hour. Click here to talk to the Liminal team and see the platform in action.