How Generative AI Governance Strengthens Secure Web Gateways
Secure Web Gateways are crucial in protecting your organization from web-based breaches, and they’re devised to withstand everything from sophisticated phishing scams to en-masse ransomware attacks and SQL injections. While these infrastructures have been engineered to prevent these kinds of occurrences, a new type of threat has emerged from the ever-changing technology landscape; and specifically, we’re talking about those that are powered by Generative AI.
Your SWG is strong, but it’s alarmingly unprepared for the type of threats that can arise as a result of GenAI usage. It provides superficial protection against Generative AI, exposing your enterprise to risks of varying scales.
The ‘gap’ between your SWG and these GenAI-powered threats is putting your operations at risk, and it’s time to take action.
It’s not all bad though; SWGs can also be reinforced by complimentary technology to ensure the right kinds of management, security, and governance standards have been established. We’re going to outline the ways that GenAI governance standards can strengthen Secure Web Gateways, increasing customer confidence in the process.
What is GenAI governance?
When referring to GenAI governance, we’re talking about the principles around usage and consumption of the technology and its outputs from a user management perspective.. These principles should be set out to ensure that GenAI is being used responsibly and safely throughout its entire life cycle.
Why GenAI governance standards are essential for any SWG system
Traditional SWGs, while effective in many respects, often struggle to keep pace with the rapid evolution of GenAI-powered threats. Many unsanctioned GenAI sites and applications can bypass traditional SWG controls, leaving organizations exposed to a wide range of risks.
A lack of GenAI governance creates the ideal conditions for increased risk and reduced benefit to the enterprise utilizing the technology. To effectively mitigate these risks and maximize the value of GenAI investments, organizations must prioritize GenAI governance standards.
We’ve detailed five reasons why SWGs must integrate GenAI governance standards, outlining the advantages that this provision can create.
1. Effective mitigation of security risks
GenAI can create vast amounts of content, some of which might be intended for malicious or deceptive purposes.
While your SWG system is designed to safeguard your organization against content-based attacks, it often falls short in detecting and mitigating the nuanced threats posed by GenAI. GenAI can generate vast amounts of content, some of which might be intended for malicious or deceptive purposes. This content can easily bypass traditional security measures, exposing your enterprise to damaging consequences.
When you ‘plug’ GenAI governance standards into your current SWG, you are essentially reinforcing your existing security protocols with GenAI-powered intelligence. When we focus in on security benefits only, SWGs equipped with GenAI governance standards can:
- Detect and alert to Harmful Behavior: Improve their ability to identify and block malicious intent, risky behavior and unsanctioned GenAI tools.
- Provide Granular Visibility: Offer deeper insights, investigations, audits and forensics into GenAI usage within your organization, enabling you to identify potential risks, trace the origins of them, identify any patterns that lie within them and then take proactive measures to mitigate their recurrence.
2. Ensures data privacy, protection and compliance
With the implementation of GenAI, the amount of data processed and analyzed increases significantly. This raises concerns about data privacy and compliance with international regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and others.
If GenAI governance standards haven’t been set. data loss can also occur, completely unbeknownst to your enterprise. This means sensitive customer data, intellectual property, or required compliance could be jeopardized, as the SWG has been unable to detect it being extracted from the system.
GenAI governance standards within SWGs help to ensure that all data handling practices align with all relevant legal requirements, protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access, misuse and loss. By maintaining this kind of compliance, organizations can avoid hefty fines and reputational crises.
3. Enhances content accuracy and integrity
One of the most prominent features of GenAI is its ability to produce highly realistic and convincing content, which, if unchecked, can lead to the spread of misinformation.
When these outputs are missed by your SWG system, the conditions for organizational distrust are created. Your enterprise could be blindly publishing and proliferating non-compliant content, generated with sensitive input data that should not have been used in your GenAI model training efforts. User privacy, data protection laws and compliance are all infringed upon in this scenario.
SWGs with robust GenAI governance standards can quickly identify these issues and alert teams to take quick action to mitigate risk in real time.
4. Facilitates responsible, transparent AI usage
The only tangible way to track responsible GenAI usage is to trace and analyze the digital trail that the technology creates. This practice, referred to as GenAI forensics. helps enterprises to ensure that best practices are being followed, while also showing them ways to use GenAI insights to optimize operational efficiency. On the other hand, this analysis can also show organizations any incidences of unsanctioned usage (shadow AI). Having a lack of transparency is an issue for SWGs, as it limits the control that they have over the way GenAI can harm their own infrastructures.
By establishing GenAI governance standards, your SWG system is actively encouraging responsible AI usage, by setting clear guidelines and ethical considerations for AI-generated content. This includes defining acceptable use cases, monitoring AI outputs for bias or malicious intent, and ensuring transparency in AI operations. Responsible AI usage not only builds trust among stakeholders, but it can also enhance the overall credibility of the organization’s digital practices. Enterprises should take it upon themselves to uphold GenAI visibility, carrying out periodic GenAI audits to ensure usage occurrences are as expected.
5. Adapts to rapid advancements
We’re seeing unparalleled growth in the capabilities that GenAI technologies have. While some create positive opportunities for enterprises, beneath the surface there are developments that are only engineered to give rise to risky and potentially damaging outcomes.
Without governance standards, organizations may struggle to keep up with these changes, potentially exposing themselves to risks of differing severity. By building GenAI governance standards into SWGs, organizations can establish a flexible framework that adapts to new technologies and threats. This proactive stance ensures continuous protection and optimal utilization of GenAI capabilities.
Reinforce your Secure Web Gateway with the Portal26 GenAI governance platform
Portal26 is a SWG companion, designed to help enterprises get clear on governance. With seamless, easy integration, often in less than 30 minutes, enterprises gain access to both historical and real time insights in just 1 week. All this while leveraging your existing SWG infrastructure without any interruption for end users.
SWGs are strong, but with our GenAI management and adoption platform, they’re made even stronger. Set new standards and see more benefits from GenAI, arrange a demo of our platform today.