If you're like many organisations today—you are probably wondering what unrealised opportunities AI can deliver to your institution. Without a doubt, AI can advance your business, disrupt your industry, offer you more IT efficiency, and increase your employee productivity—but only if it's implemented securely and correctly around well-defined use cases with tangle metrics of success. And that's where many organisations often find themselves struggling. It's no longer a question of whether you will need AI to remain competitive in your mind, but of narrowing down what you want to do with AI to achieve your business objectives in a meaningful and secure way.
If you find yourself nodding your head, you are not alone. Our experience with the companies we talk to at IGXGlobal, we see about 80% organisations fall into the AI-curious stage of their journey. You are looking to educate yourself on what AI could do for you and are eager to start your first proof-of-concepts. What many organisations find though, is it is a large leap from proof-of-concepts to building out your AI workloads in the AI-ready stage to true AI-maturity of optimisation—both financial optimisation as well as workload optimisation.
However, what many organisations gloss over in their eagerness to benefit from AI is the security and data preparation needed. That's where IGXGlobal and a technology partner like F5 can accelerate your AI journey because together, we can help you more rapidly iterate, test, and deploy your AI workloads and AI-powered applications in a secure fashion, and at scale. It is one thing to have a proof-of-concept in your development environment and quite another to run it in a production environment that delivers secure performance at scale.
The truth is, scaling your AI systems requires robust and flexible infrastructure tailored to your unique deployment needs. No matter where your AI is deployed (SaaS, edge-hosted, cloud-hosted, self-hosted, or in Kubernetes) F5 optimises data processing to help reduce costs and enhance performance securely. Together with F5, IGXGlobal experts can help you protect and streamline your AI model training, fine-tuning, and inference with advanced traffic management, scalable infrastructure, and secure data handling.
And when it comes to securely running your AI in production and at scale, IGXGlobal and F5 can help. The recent announcement of F5's acquisition of CalypsoAI adds an exciting new dimension to this story. With CalypsoAI integrated into the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform, they will soon offer cutting-edge AI runtime security to help tackle the rapidly evolving landscape of AI threats. These enhanced capabilities address critical concerns like prompt injection attacks, jailbreak vulnerabilities, data leaks, and model misbehaviour, ensuring your AI operates as intended and in full compliance with regulatory standards.
Securing your AI systems requires a tailored approach based on your deployment model, service needs, and management preferences since no two organisations are alike. However, IGXGlobal along with F5 can assist you with preventing data leaks, monitoring endpoints, and securing workloads—ensuring robust security against prompt injection attacks, API vulnerabilities, and Kubernetes threats with F5's comprehensive technology solutions implemented with IGXGlobal expertise.
Here are two immediate steps you can take to help move your organisation from AI-curious towards AI-mature in a safe and scalable manner.
- Clearly define your success metrics to measure your ROI against. Moving your AI application from fledgling proof-of-concept to full scale production may involve implementing additional security and scalability measures. It is important to make sure you are getting the tangible outputs you hoped for that will drive your business forward to justify the expense.
- Clearly understand where both the data your AI uses is residing, how it is governed, and how it is secured. Additionally, since most AI workloads are API driven, you need a clear API security strategy around your AI or you may expose your organisation to undue risks in the quest for immediate AI gains.
No matter where you are in your AI journey—from curious through mature—IGXGlobal as a systems integrator and F5 as a trusted technology partner can help move you from experimentation to at-scale deployment in secure and ROI-driven way!
Additional blog authors: David Tumlin, ePlus Security Services & Ian Lauth, F5 Senior Manager, Product Marketing