Access Governance: Your Key to
Governing AI in the Enterprise

Insight from Matt Gantner and Dan Miller, Altum Strategy Group and Hennie Vermeulen, SafePaaS.

In the race to harness AI's transformative power, organizations face a critical question: How can teams unleash innovation while keeping the AI genie firmly in the governance bottle?

As AI changes business operations, teams are confronted with new challenges in managing and governing these tools. The rapid adoption of AI technologies brings remarkable opportunities for innovation and efficiency, but it also introduces complex risks that demand careful oversight.

Access governance is a crucial element in ensuring that AI systems are used properly and securely within your enterprise. By implementing effective access governance and a robust controls framework, teams can strike a delicate balance between encouraging innovation and maintaining control over AI initiatives.

In this blog, we'll explore the critical role that access governance plays in capturing the full potential of AI while protecting your organization against inherent risks. We'll provide actionable strategies to implement effective access controls for your AI systems, ensuring that you can confidently steer the AI revolution without compromising security.

Understanding AI as an Application and an Accelerator

At its core, teams should recognize that there are two critical components to AI. First, is addressing AI just as another application within the enterprise ecosystem.This perspective allows you to approach AI governance using familiar access control principles. When you consider AI tools, remember that they are fundamentally applications with the ability to accelerate the capabilities of the organization.

These acceleration capabilities are AI’s most attractive quality. These acceleration capabilities can go in several directions. If not managed appropriately, and closely monitored, these capabilities can make slightly incorrect decision or data inference become an incredibly significant issue, in a short amount of time. These types of issues may result in significant reputational risk and do an incredible amount of damage before the organization has time to respond or course correct on the defect.

Another critical aspect of AI is the Data. One the one hand, data is critical to the success of AI across the organization. The saying “Garbage In, Garbage out” is not only true, but magnified many times. Organizations must place an elevated level of scrutiny on the data that goes into, and how it is leveraged within their AI solutions.

Like any other application in your environment, AI systems, especially third-party systems, can store and leverage data for training.. For third party systems, it is important to understand where the data is both stored and used. Organizations must be aware of the usage policies, procedures, and storage within third party systems to prevent leakage of trade secrets, personally identifiable information, or sensitive client data.

By viewing AI through this lens, organizations should work to apply you can apply your existing knowledge of access control and data management to effectively govern these powerful AI tools within your organization.

Access Governance: Your Key to Governing AI in the Enterprise

As organizations steer the complex landscape of AI adoption in your organization, access governance is a critical solution for ensuring responsible and secure use of these technologies.

Here is how organizations can leverage access governance to effectively manage AI within your enterprise:

Data Management

To safeguard your AI training data and ensure compliance, you organizations should implement
access governance solutions that allow you to:

Control who can access sensitive AI training datasets
Establish clear use of AI, how it will be deployed and what data will be used for training across the organization
Set up comprehensive monitoring and auditing processes for data inputs to your AI systems
Establish rigorous data quality checks and privacy compliance measures

Acceptable Use Policies

Enforce your AI-acceptable use policies through access governance platforms that enable you
to:

Restrict user access to only approved and vetted AI tools
Consider implementing an Appropriate Use Policy outlining approved uses and solutions
Implement continuous monitoring of AI usage patterns across your organization
Set up automated alerts for potential policy violations or unusual activity

Application Approval Process

Streamline your AI tool adoption process by utilizing access governance solutions to:

Create customized workflows for AI tool requests and approvals

Maintain a centralized inventory of all approved AI applications

Ensure thorough vetting and security assessments of new AI tools before deployment

Subscription Management

Effectively manage your AI subscriptions by leveraging access governance to:

Control access to different tiers of AI service subscriptions

Implement data handling protocols based on subscription levels

Generate detailed reports on subscription usage and associated costs

Balancing Innovation and Security

As you strive to encourage innovation while maintaining security, your access governance strategy should help you:

Promote responsible AI adoption across departments

Identify and mitigate AI-specific risks proactively

Provide ongoing compliance with evolving data privacy regulations

Create a framework that enables innovation while upholding security standards

Remember, as AI becomes increasingly integrated into your business operations, a strong access governance approach will play a pivotal role in ensuring these tools are leveraged securely and responsibly. By treating AI as another critical application within the enterprise ecosystem and applying strong access control principles, the organization can harness the full benefits of AI while minimizing associated risks.

To stay ahead, consider implementing AI-specific training programs, regularly updating AI governance policies, and leveraging advanced analytics to continuously improve access control measures.

By taking a proactive and comprehensive approach to AI governance, organizations will be positioned to thrive in the AI-driven future while maintaining the trust of stakeholders and customers.