6 Ways to Securely Adopt AI, From Cloud Security to Backup Storage

As AI becomes embedded across workplace applications, it expands the attack surface in ways many organizations are not fully prepared for. This includes heightened risks around sensitive data exposure, unauthorized access and lack of governance.

• Data leakage and privacy exposure: AI models trained on ungoverned datasets may expose sensitive corporate or customer information through prompts or outputs
• Uncontrolled access and identity gaps: AI agents interacting across systems can bypass weak identity and access management policies
• Shadow AI and governance blind spots: Employees adopting unsanctioned AI tools create gaps in visibility, compliance and control

To address these risks, organizations need end-to-end security controls that extend across data, identities, applications and AI models. These include zero-trust principles, strong data governance, continuous monitoring and secure integration across environments.

With a strong security approach, organizations can focus on extracting value from their AI initiatives, instead of fixing loopholes or mitigating risks.

While each organization has a unique AI ecosystem, many face challenges with where AI is hosted, which data it can read and how it is configured. The following solutions tackle six key security areas that affect AI implementations the most.  

A lot of organizations may want to run AI in the cloud, at least in the pilot phase, to conduct early tests and benefit from on-demand scaling.

Public cloud assets, while they offer cost-friendly data hosting and APIs, may introduce risks that go beyond traditional workloads. Sensitive data may flow to external models through APIs, AI services may be misconfigured and exposed endpoints can become entry points for attackers.

Therefore, it’s important to secure the cloud, both from an infrastructure and data access standpoint, before AI models or applications are installed on it.

Our partners at Wiz address this challenge with their AI security posture management (AI-SPM) solution, which extends cloud-native security to the unique demands of AI.

At its core, AI-SPM provides comprehensive visibility into AI ecosystems, discovering models, agents and active services. It can quickly identify the underlying dependencies across cloud platforms without requiring additional agents. This way, it is able to build a real-time inventory of the AI footprint, mapping how these components connect to data sources, identities and infrastructure.

With this improved visibility, Wiz continuously evaluates the security posture of AI deployments. It identifies misconfigurations, unsecured defaults and excessive permissions that can expose sensitive data or create unintended access pathways.

• Full visibility into AI environments with discovery of models, agents and pipelines across cloud and SaaS platforms
• Context-driven risk prioritization using attack path analysis to focus on exploitable vulnerabilities
• Integrated threat detection and response with insights into AI-specific threats and guided remediation

Shadow AI, the use of AI tools that aren’t approved by the IT team, is still a key security risk. Employees may end up leaking sensitive data to a public AI tool, violating security controls.

Or they may use an AI tool with unknown model risks, putting their work integrity at risk. Imagine a software developer using an unapproved coding assistant that is capable of introducing application-level vulnerabilities.

It’s often difficult for IT teams to monitor shadow AI usage. The problem intensifies when AI agents start accessing resources that are not intended for them. They can put sensitive data and critical business resources at risk.

Our partners at Cloudflare help tackle this challenge with their SASE-based approach to securing AI access. Their Cloudflare One platform positions itself between users and AI tools to enforce consistent, identity-driven controls.

The platform enables organizations to discover and manage all AI usage, including sanctioned and unsanctioned tools, through a unified control plane.

Once visibility is established, Cloudflare applies zero-trust access controls to regulate how users and systems connect to AI tools. Access policies are enforced based on identity, device posture and context, ensuring that only authorized users (AI or human) can interact with specific AI applications.

Cloudflare also offers secure portals for AI agents to enable access for tools and resources based on the least privilege principle.

• Complete visibility into AI usage, including shadow AI discovery and risk assessments
• Granular, identity-based access control aligned with zero-trust principles
• Real-time protection of prompts and data with data loss prevention (DLP) and contextual guardrails

Endpoint devices, laptops, tablets and mobile devices now routinely interact with AI platforms, cloud applications and external data sources. These tools improve productivity, but they also expand the attack surface: users may unknowingly expose sensitive data to public AI tools, fall victim to AI-driven phishing or introduce malicious scripts through AI-assisted workflows.

Meanwhile, attackers continue to target endpoints and identities as the easiest path in, especially where visibility is limited or IT resources are lean.

Our partners at Malwarebytes offer the ThreatDown solution that helps organizations stay ahead of evolving cyberthreats through a unified MDR platform, delivering the protection, visibility and response capabilities needed to stop attacks before they disrupt the business.

From ransomware and malware to credential compromise and emerging AI-driven threats, ThreatDown is beneficial for lean IT and security teams. It enables them to reduce risk, respond faster and protect endpoints, identities and cloud through a simplified, integrated security experience.

It's one platform that includes EDR, MDR and ITDR and has been engineered for strong security. It offers ease of use as well as lightweight handling, deployed through a single agent. Behavioural detection, threat intelligence and AI-driven analysis surface both known and unknown threats, while rapid investigation and automated remediation contain them when they appear.

The same platform also shrinks the attack surface up front, with vulnerability assessment, automated patching, application blocking, DNS filtering and centralized policy management. These capabilities matter most in AI-enabled environments where endpoints constantly connect to outside platforms, users and services.

• Strong, continuous protection with optional 24/7 MDR support
• Advanced detection and automated response across endpoints and identities
• Fast deployment and fewer alerts, freeing up lean IT teams
• Better visibility into credential abuse, social engineering and other evolving techniques

AI systems rely on large volumes of structured and unstructured data, often distributed across clouds, endpoints and hybrid environments. Even when organizations focus heavily on prevention and detection, these data assets can still fall prey to sophisticated exfiltration attacks. And that spells trouble for any organization.

A single breach incident, data corruption event or system failure can disrupt AI operations, halt business processes and lead to irreversible data loss.

In critical scenarios, the inability to restore systems quickly can have financial, operational and regulatory consequences. Even with strong preventive controls, organizations must assume breach and focus on resilience.

Our partners at Acronis offer the Cyber Protect platform, which combines backup, disaster recovery and security capabilities into a unified solution. It provides continuous backup of systems and data, enabling organizations to capture full system images without disrupting operations.

The Cyber Protect platform is designed with resilience and speed in mind. Features such as One Click Recovery simplify the restoration process, allowing systems to be brought back online quickly, even by non-specialized staff. Its universal restore capability enables recovery to different hardware or environments, which is crucial in dynamic cloud and hybrid infrastructures.

Acronis also extends beyond traditional backup by embedding recovery into a broader cybersecurity resilience strategy. It supports live backup without taking systems offline, centralizes monitoring and enables rapid restoration from local or cloud-based backups.

• Fast, reliable recovery with full image backups and quick recovery to minimize downtime
• Protection against ransomware and data tampering with immutable backups and secure restore processes
• Flexible recovery options across cloud, on-prem and different hardware environments

The 2026 Canadian Cybersecurity Study found that ransomware continues to be the number one security concern for Canadian organizations for the sixth consecutive year.

Ransomware attacks are particularly damaging because of their growing ability to penetrate defences and cause long-term business disruption. Attackers are increasingly targeting backup repositories to prevent recovery, leaving organisations with no viable path to restore operations.

At the same time, rapid AI adoption can inadvertently expand the attack surface. Without strong controls such as immutable backup storage, attackers can exploit weak controls and modify or delete backup data, effectively removing the last line of defence.

Our partners at Object First address this challenge with a purpose-built approach to immutable backup storage, built on the principle of absolute immutability. This means that even the most privileged administrator or attacker with access to backup storage cannot modify or delete data.

This protection is enforced through a zero-access architecture. By eliminating privileged access paths entirely, Object First significantly reduces the risk of credential compromise and insider threats.

The solution is built on secure AWS S3 object storage, leveraging native immutability capabilities such as Object Lock and versioning to ensure that data is protected from the moment it is written.

As a purpose-built target appliance, Object First is securely separated from backup software. This creates a critical line of defence that prevents attackers from compromising both layers simultaneously.

Object First also enforces an ‘eight-eyes’ protocol: two customer-side individuals and two vendor-side staff must validate any potentially destructive action.

Crucially, Object First’s appliance has been independently verified through repeated testing by NCC Group, providing third-party validation of its resilience against real-world attack scenarios.

• Highly available data integrity and recoverability with immutable storage that cannot be altered or deleted
• Protection against credential compromise and insider threats through advanced security controls
• Reduced attack surface with the separation of backup storage and backup management systems

The network becomes a key security component as AI agents start using it for automated tasks. An agent may try to access resources on shared internal networks or make API calls to achieve its tasks. But without strong network-level enforcement, AI agents may be able to carry out activities that rapidly expand the attack surface.

At the same time, certain AI applications may create a larger dependency on the network. Apps that need to access resources from local drives or cloud resources may require more bandwidth, leading to performance disruptions.

Ensuring that the network is equipped with security controls is essential for IT teams adopting new AI tools.

Our partners at Netskope solve the networking challenge with their Netskope One platform, a converged, cloud-native solution.

The platform deploys a zero-trust engine that continuously inspects and evaluates all traffic across web, SaaS, cloud and AI applications. It performs deep, inline inspection by decrypting and decoding activity in real time to decipher network-based threats.

This is complemented by the NewEdge network from Netskope, a globally distributed infrastructure designed to deliver high-performance, low-latency connectivity. By processing traffic closer to the user, Netskope eliminates the need for backhauling, which enables secure access to AI applications without performance degradation.

The NewEdge platform’s single-pass architecture ensures that traffic is inspected once across all security services, reducing latency while maintaining comprehensive protection.

• Unified security and networking through a converged SASE platform that simplifies architecture and reduces tool sprawl
• Optimized performance at scale using a global network and single-pass inspection to minimize latency
• Adaptive zero-trust enforcement that dynamically adjusts access based on risk, user context and data sensitivity

Secure systems act as the backbone for sound AI implementation. By addressing security first, you can significantly reduce AI-related risks as your adoption scales.

CDW Canada, with our deep security expertise and partnership with leading solution providers, can help you build a strong AI security foundation. Our security experts can help you chart your security maturity journey and bring in right-sized solutions for your specific organizational needs.

We also provide AI security for organizations ready to adopt AI for a variety of employee and customer needs. Our solutions span across zero trust, SASE, incident response and security monitoring, enabling end-to-end protection.

Whether you’re deploying a cloud posture management solution or integrating smart backups, CDW works as an extension of your IT team to help you build a scalable AI foundation.