In the first episode of season 2, our expert Steve Lazzara discusses security preparations for AI integration and gives an update on how his vision from last year played out.

Transcript

Did your vision from last year come true?

My vision from last year was focused more on the usage of data or the availability rather of data for remote work. In 2023 really got overshadowed instead in regards on the data side to protect it from the number the massive increase of data breaches and cyber attacks that occurred. In addition was kind of the unexpected introduction of AI being released and the growth of its usage almost geometrically um beyond what was expected. And those two items by themselves kind of overshadowed the usage of it for remote work as well as the continual discussions on returning to the office versus remote. A lot of companies just shifted to say, okay, let's set focus on securing the environment due to the cyberattacks and you know what do we need to do to prepare for AI.


What do you expect to see in 2024?

So, in 2024 explicitly, I expect to see in terms of data protection, companies falling into two different categories. There are those who are preparing for the implementation of AI in their environment and there are those who are trying to secure the environment from these new AI enhanced cyberattacks. Now I think it's important to note that while the reasoning to protect your data has adjusted and changed in all cases it's the initial steps are the same. So in order to protect data within a company regardless if you're doing it to prepare your environment to utilize AI and you want to prevent any internal breaches or internal data exposure or if you're trying to protect your data from external threats, the process really starts the same way for the first part which is you need to identify your data through classification and label your data starting with sensitivity labels. Everything else builds on that. So those are the key aspects regardless of why you're doing it but what you need to do in rolling forward.


What is Valorem Reply doing to prepare for this trend?

Here at Valorem Reply, we already have a standardized methodical process to protect data and this model is being integrated within all of our teams that focus on AI, in addition to focusing on our security practice in environmental protection in general. It's leveraging our experience in those areas we've actually taken what we're doing today for basic data protection hygiene and we are implementing it with our AI solution teams as part of the preparation for an environment to add AI into their environment as a tool set as well as working then with companies that want to protect their environment as a breach as a completely separate non-AI offering. The fact that we've already got the experience and are utilizing this standardized process to implement these pieces kind of gives us a preposition in the market for assisting companies that want to implement AI solutions because we already understand how to classify and then protect and and label your data before you implement a product such just copilot or if you're looking at what you want to do or need to do for insurance purposes or other data protection needs so our position in preparing it has simply been to really pair what we're already doing our current process engagements and involvement to the expanded cataloguing of what you want to do around AI or what you're going to be looking at with regards to cyber security as a whole.