Advanced Solutions

Hyper automation, generative AI (GenAI) and AI agents are providing new opportunities for security providers to demonstrate value. 

The increasing deployment and development of AI solutions is leading to a growing number of high-profile cases of enterprises falling victim to attacks unique to AI.

But how do you turn that into a customer conversation? The key is understanding how your customer accesses their AI tools, the type of AI solution they’re using and your customer’s current policy towards their use.

By demonstrating competency in securing the different types of AI solutions, you can start making real recommendations about what tools and services your customers can use to address the threat vectors unique to AI. 

Here's just a few ideas to start the AI security conversation with your customers:

Optimize internal AI accessibility.

A growing number of legacy applications offer GenAI or agentic features, and it's no stretch to expect such features to be universal soon.

Today, many organizations are turning to publicly available AI tools for productivity gains. While an obvious recommendation is to simply avoid shadow AI usage, recommending private alternatives or ensuring that you can provide visibility and control of GenAI plugins is a great way to win business and prevent unsanctioned AI use in your customer’s business. 

The question of AI accessibility is also a means of perusing land-and-expand plays. Getting your foot in the door by monitoring and managing a customer's officially sanctioned AI applications can be a great way of building trust before probing for what other unsanctioned applications are being used by your customer’s organization.  

Often businesses have teams that employ specialized GenAI tools for highly specified tasks, such as brand and content. By securing their more broadly adopted applications, you can win business by offering to monitor and secure their niche tools down the road. 

Harden AI security with external offerings. 

Enterprises are increasingly providing AI tools to their own customer base. Some of the unique threat vectors to consider here are hallucination-induced disclosures, prompt injection and data poisoning.

The broad threat with these threat vectors involves a malicious actor getting ahold of sensitive information. Popular AI development platforms offer guardrails, but these have been beaten by repeated probing in several high-profile cases.  

Secure agentic AI. 

One issue that’s particularly important to secure AI agent deployments is monitoring application programming interface (API) traffic. By being able to establish and monitor a behavioral baseline for your customer’s AI agents, you can ensure that API calls made by the agents do not display unusual patterns. 

This service is critical to ensure that a malicious actor hasn’t highjacked a trusted webservice plugin to maintain a persistent backdoor by uploading their own malicious library into your customers’ main application domain.

This is becoming an increasingly common threat vector affecting agentic AI applications, which rely on increased access to provide the hyper automation that’s the cornerstone of their value proposition.  

Field your own AI. 

Security operation center agents and purpose-built AI access security solutions are available now and offer a serious competitive advantage. By harnessing machine learning models that are purpose-built to look for such events, you can guarantee that you can outperform a competitor relying on rule-based detection. 

Walk the walk with TD SYNNEX.

While this article did not go into any specifics about recent examples of AI specific attacks that have made prime-time news, or specific solutions to address the attack vectors that led to them, being armed with the information, skill set and countermeasures that are specific to securing GenAI and agentic AI applications will be critical moving forward. 

To learn how you can win business (and tell the whole story behind AI security), contact our AI ISV Ecosystem team at AIEco@tdsynnex.com. If you’re ready to get started on your own AI journey, start today with our free AI Maturity Assessment Tool.