Federal Data Security Challenges in the Age of AI

AI is the talk of the town — for enterprises, government agencies, and more. However, AI depends on the data that goes into it to create successful outputs, which poses an extreme risk to organizations that don’t have proper security procedures and controls in place.  

I had the opportunity to discuss the rise in AI and the need for data security in the public sector with John Gilroy on the Federal Tech Podcast. In this blog, I’ll summarize some of the key points from our discussion. 

Continue reading to learn more or listen to the full podcast episode below. 

The importance of data security for federal agencies 

The amount of data that we're producing as a country is growing every day. In just a couple of years, we can expect to have twice as much sensitive data as we have today.  

The Government produces a LOT of data. At Varonis, we’ve observed that people don't realize they've actually shared information that is sensitive.  

Sensitive information doesn’t mean only classified information. It could be information on some drug trials if you’re at the FDA, or maybe it has something to do with supply chain information if you’re at CISA. For the Department of Defense, it could be the commanding officer’s license plate number.  

Some of that information above is sensitive, and a majority of the time it is categorized as controlled, but unclassified information. However, it’s the data that shouldn't be exposed to a large audience.  

With the rise of AI and the cloud, it’s more important than ever for government agencies to take a data-centric approach to security to keep critical information secure.  

The rise of data security posture management and complete coverage 

Zero Trust is also a piece of the puzzle for data security posture management (DSPM) in the federal government, which gives agencies visibility into risks.  

A term coined by Gartner, “Data security posture management (DSPM) provides visibility as to where sensitive data is, who has access to that data, how it has been used, and what the security posture of the data stored or application is.” 

A true DSPM solution should discover your sensitive data, classify and label that information, and let you enable security and privacy controls around it so your organization can safely use that data day-to-day, and then monitor for threats against the data.  

At Varonis, we take DSPM a step further by allowing you to really visualize areas of risks like over exposure. For example, maybe an employee is not supposed to have access to certain files or folders because they contain sensitive information.  

Varonis allows teams to use automation to remediate permission access risks and then moves you into a continuous monitoring phase, which is exactly what the government is requiring IT organizations to move into. Varonis monitors the sensitive data, so when there’s any anomalous behavior against it, we’ll alert and block that activity. 

The CISA Zero Trust maturity model, which civilian agencies follow, defines complete coverage as the ability to identify sensitive data across your entire environment. This includes all your legacy data centers and in all your clouds — AWS, Microsoft, Google, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and others. Sensitive government data is in all of these places.  

Combatting risks to data in the world of AI 

It doesn't matter if it's a bad actor from a state-sponsored nation or a malicious insider—they're after the data. That's why we put security controls around the data so that we can protect it. 

Let’s look back at AI as an example. You want to ensure that the data that you're feeding into large language models is protected and that there aren't any inaccuracies. If you're one degree off, the ship is one degree off, and you're sailing a thousand miles, where do you end up? 

It's the same analogy with data. You have to make sure that the data is protected and that it has the right level of governance and privacy controls, whether that's an end user or a data scientist building it into a large language model to enable. 

How Varonis can help 

At Varonis, we help our federal customers solve complicated problems around leveraging their data for mission outcomes and doing it in a secure way. 

Our market-leading Data Security Platform gives security teams actual visibility into their data and where sensitive information may be overexposed. Once Varonis classifies that sensitive data, we are able to understand who should and shouldn’t have access to it, how users interact with it, and automatically alert and remediate issues when suspicious behavior is detected.  

Varonis' automation and cloud capabilities allow us to take a monumental leap in how we're helping our clients find, fix, and alert on data activity. All it takes is the click of a button, and you can actually see the change.  

Ready to see Varonis in action? Get a quick, personalized demo today.  

Watch my full episode on the Federal Tech Podcast with the links below.