Osterman Research

We attended RSAC 2024 in San Francisco from May 6-8. Our days at the conference were packed with back-to-back briefings. 

Here’s some notes on our briefing with Eric Andrews (VP, Marketing) of Securiti. The briefing was organized by Eric. 

Key takeaways from the briefing and some subsequent research:

• Securiti has been in business for almost five years.
• Their key focus is driving convergence around data, so that it can be used for making decisions (“data intelligence”). Eric said that the senior leaders they speak with are particularly vocal on the pain / problem of disconnected data, because it makes important aspects of running a business much more difficult, e.g., shaping understanding, enabling cross-team collaboration, and making decisions.
• The emergence of generative AI and its impact on the creation of more unstructured data has made the problem of disconnected data worse.
• Securiti has created a knowledge graph for creating an overall understanding of what data is available inside the organization, where it is located, who has access to it, and which regulations are applicable. Eric talks about this as the underlying platform for Securiti and its customers, on top of which multiple use cases can be built. Securiti doesn’t create an aggregated store of all data in the organization; rather it creates a graph of all data while leaving it where it is and subject to the access controls already established.
• “Shadow AI” is the next frontier of “shadow something” in organizations. It is easy for people / groups to use whatever AI systems they want. It is harder for organizations to have guardrails, oversight, and where necessary, control.
• Securiti announced an LLM firewall the week before RSAC (see press release) – well, actually three firewalls in one product. See the diagram below (the flow runs right to left and back again). The Securiti LLM Firewall protects three processes of using prompt-based LLMs – the initial prompt, the retrieval of data, and the release of data to the requesting user / process. The initial prompt must traverse the prompt firewall, and this blocks threats such as prompt injection, the inclusion of sensitive data in prompts, and attempts to bypass security guardrails. The retrieval firewall ensures that only data the user has access to is used in formulating an answer to the prompt, redacts sensitive data, and checks for data poisoning. Finally, the response firewall does a final check before data is presented to the user / process to redact sensitive information and prevent the release of toxic content or prohibited topics.

• Securiti published a report on securing generative AI applications, which explores the threat to generative AI and LLMs and where its firewall plays.
• Securiti has a much broader set of product capabilities for data discovery, intelligence, and governance. We didn’t have time to explore the full product set.

For more, see Securiti.