Artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting every industry, promising unprecedented innovation and efficiency. But that power requires responsibility, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. As businesses race to adopt AI, the question isn’t just how to implement it, but how to implement it securely. Dell Technologies is at the forefront of this challenge, championing a proactive and comprehensive AI strategy centered around the Dell AI Factory, with security woven into its very fabric from day zero.

The Evolving AI Landscape: New Frontiers, New Risks

AI isn’t new to cybersecurity; it’s been a tool in the defender’s arsenal for over a decade. However, the advent of generative AI and now agentic AI has fundamentally shifted the threat landscape. Agentic AI applications, capable of operating with minimal human intervention and making independent judgments, introduce complex new patterns of communication and behavior that traditional security models struggle to understand.

This advancement brings a host of IT and business risks. Attack surfaces are increasing, vulnerabilities are becoming more novel, and significant challenges in detecting and responding to AI-driven attacks are rising. Compliance becomes a minefield, and the potential for uncontrolled outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) raises serious concerns about reputational damage and privacy. Unlike previous technological shifts like cloud adoption, where security often played catch-up, Dell emphasizes that for AI, security and risk conversations must happen from the very first architectural design choice, or day zero.

Security as an Architectural Design Choice: Dell’s Foundational Approach

In this presentation from Security Field Day, Dell advocated for a fundamentally cross-functional approach to AI deployments. This means bringing together IT, business, data, application and security teams from the outset. Security and resilience aren’t afterthoughts; they are architectural design choices. This early integration is crucial given the blistering pace of AI adoption.

Their architectural vision for securing AI is robust. Customers train their models by taking pre-trained models from marketplaces like Hugging Face and integrating them with their proprietary corporate data. A critical preparatory step involves organizing and consolidating diverse data islands like sales and HR data into a well-governed data mesh with proper identity and RBAC permissions before it ever feeds into an AI model. These models can then run in various environments, from on-premises Dell AI Factory solutions to the cloud or even on AI PCs.

The Dell AI Factory: Accelerating Innovation, Securely

The core of Dell’s AI strategy is the Dell AI Factory. Imagine a traditional factory, but instead of physical goods, it mass-produces AI capabilities at scale. The purpose is to help customers accelerate their AI innovation and improve their time-to-market, a key metric for in today’s business world.

The AI Factory brings together Dell’s best-of-breed infrastructure, including powerful AI PCs and comprehensive data center solutions, like compute, storage, and GPU-enabled systems. It integrates seamlessly with a diverse ecosystem of leading AI-enabled partners like NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD, as well as AI marketplaces such as Hugging Face, which offer millions of models for customers to leverage. A significant component of the AI Factory is the extensive suite of services built around these products, all geared towards supporting customers’ AI acceleration journey.

This factory supports the entire AI implementation lifecycle, from the initial training of models combining pre-trained models with corporate data to running them in production across various environments. Throughout this entire process, security is not an add-on, but an inherent part of the design. It’s integrated into the design from the beginning so there’s no chance of anything being left out.

Comprehensive Services and Solutions for AI Security

Dell brings its AI security architecture to life through its comprehensive services organization, offering a layered approach to protection:

• Strategic Advisory Services: Helping customers tailor AI security to their specific needs, including a “virtual CISO” offering specialized expertise for AI risks.
• Implementation Services: Deploying the necessary AI solution hardware and critical security software around the AI factory.
• Continuous Threat Management: Provided through their managed services teams, ensuring ongoing vigilance.
• Assessment and Risk Reduction Services: Identifying threat surfaces and mitigating AI-associated risks like data poisoning and prompt injection, which are key concerns highlighted by OWASP Top 10.
• Managed Detection and Response (MDR) for AI: Dell has specifically built its MDR offering to manage security for AI, augmenting existing security operations. This provides deep visibility into the infrastructure layer, data security posture, and cloud/container environments, leveraging platforms like CrowdStrike’s next-generation SIEM.
• AI Proxy/AI Firewall: A managed service that performs deep inspection at the prompt level, enforcing guardrails, detecting compliance violations, and blocking malicious code injected into prompts. This is a powerful example of using AI to defend AI.
• Penetration Testing: A new service capability designed to directly test against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities in AI implementations, ensuring continuous proper implementation of guardrails.
• Data Protection and Proactive Detection: Offering robust solutions for backup and recovery of LLMs and vector databases. They emphasize proactive detection, correlating proprietary threat indicators with CrowdStrike to identify ongoing attacks (e.g., unusual administrative logins) rather than just forensic analysis after an incident.
• Incident Response and Recovery Hours: Included in managed detection offers, providing expert teams to help recover data protection environments and other technologies, offering a single point of contact for recovery by combining incident response with their engineering teams.

Bringing It All Together

Dell Technologies understands that the future is AI-driven, and that future must be secure by design. Through the Dell AI Factory and its integrated, comprehensive security services, they are not just providing the tools for AI innovation; they are providing the framework for secure AI innovation. By emphasizing day zero security conversations, cross-functional collaboration, and a robust suite of protective measures, Dell is empowering businesses to confidently navigate the complexities of AI, accelerate their journey, and unlock its full potential while safeguarding their most critical assets.