Without proper Information Management, organisations can be left vulnerable to some potentially serious risks. Let’s talk about how to protect your business, before deploying AI tools.
AI is everywhere. At least in the press, and in the plans of thousands of product managers. But, in many cases, it’s a new version of a tired marketing trick – include the words Artificial Intelligence and it will get people’s attention.
Indeed, it can be argued that a significant proportion of the tech sector is misusing the term AI in describing capabilities and underlying technologies. Very little tech has actual AI, it just has complex logic written by a human and is only as good as the person that wrote it. That’s not so much AI as SI – someone’s intelligence. A few years ago, the same ideas might as well have included metaverse, and 10 years ago perhaps 3D, because these were the tech obsessions of the time that would have got people’s attention.
However, we should all be aware of a particular threat that AI and machine learning tech (or any advances in data mining and search for that matter) poses to organisations today.
Poor information management exposes data to risk from AI Tools
For those organisations that haven’t got their house in order with adequate information management, they’re likely to have poorly managed sensitive and/or confidential data sitting in their corporate repositories. This data will be there today and potentially accessible to users when it shouldn’t be, but users and organisations might be blissfully unaware it’s there.
We have seen this scenario many times before. For example, clients migrate their file shares with existing security models to SharePoint, only to discover that now users have a search tool in SharePoint. Suddenly, users can search across content that was always accessible but has only now been revealed. And that is often confidential and sensitive content they should never have had access to in the file shares in the first place.
Now, layer on the power of AI to these environments and this is where the real threat comes in as the AI tool surfaces poorly managed content to users even when they’re not necessarily looking for it. Real confidential and sensitive data freely available, private information becoming public.
With all the talk of bad actors outside of the organisation and the need to protect perimeters and endpoints, organisations must make information management a priority or it may well be those very tools introduced to help users that become the bad actors from within. World-class AI must be underpinned by world-class information management.