Protect Your Artificial Intelligence Deployments with a Modern Security Gateway
While large enterprises are making aggressive bets on Artificial Intelligence (AI), many SMBs are also discovering the value of AI as well. In fact, a recent October 2025 survey showed that 88% of small businesses use AI tools. However, AI adoption also brings significant new risks as well, particularly for SMBs that already lack the cybersecurity resources and expertise of their larger competitors. Some of these risks include:
- AI tools that connect to databases, CRMs, file shares, and APIs create new attack avenues as well as an expanded attack surface.
- AI agents sometimes operate with excessive access rights that create pathways for privilege escalation, lateral movement, or data exfiltration.
- AI chatbots and virtual assistants that utilize language models are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks or malicious instructions that can induce unintended behaviors.
The New Danger of Shadow AI
Just when you thought your organization was reigning in Shadow IT, an even more dangerous threat is emerging called Shadow AI. While employees may be turning to unauthorized AI tools with good intentions, they are inadvertently feeding confidential data into public models, risking leaks, compliance violations, and intellectual property theft. Because AI systems process, retain, and sometimes repurpose the data they’re given, unsanctioned SaaS AI tools potentially represent a far greater threat than SaaS apps. Some basic examples of Shadow AI include:
- An employee uploads sensitive data to an LLM to save time writing a report.
- A sales rep installs a Chrome extension that summarizes customer emails or auto-writes replies using GPT-style AI.
- Employees use third party meeting bots to record and summarize Zoom or Team calls that end up capturing confidential discussions that are stored in the cloud.
- An operations manager exports CSVs from confidential systems and uploads them to an AI data-insight site to get performance summaries.
- A marketing employee adds a third-party AI chatbot widget to the company site to improve engagement.
What SMBs need is a way to close the doors that these AI tools are using to prevent sensitive information from leaving the secure confines of the enterprise.
AI productivity gains mean nothing if they expose your organization to data breaches and compliance violations. A secure AI gateway ensures your team can leverage AI tools without compromising sensitive information or regulatory requirements.
For SMBs that lack the internal expertise and financial resources of Fortune 500 companies, a gateway provides a solution that combines simplicity and security into one package. From a security perspective, it acts as a control layer that wraps a secure, isolated perimeter around your data's interaction with external AI.
- A gateway creates secure boundaries that isolate your internal data from the public AI models, preventing sensitive information from being absorbed.
- It limits the blast radius of a data leak, preventing a single user's mistake from exposing an entire dataset.
- It enforces least privilege by creating rules that dictate what data types can and cannot be included in a prompt, reducing the attack surface.
- A gateway simplifies the monitoring of model actions, system logs, and user interactions in real time, so that suspicious behavior or policy violations can be identified.
- Security and compliance rules are standardized for all users and departments, eliminating gaps caused by ad-hoc AI usage.
From both an operational and security standpoint, a secure AI gateway is ideally suited for SMBs. It offers policy enforcement, risk mitigation, and complete visibility without the overhead of building an internal AI solution from scratch.
Secure Business Uses for AI
Only when you have a secure AI gateway in place can you begin to unlock the full potential of AI. Here are a few examples of how you can leverage AI for practical applications in a highly secure manner:
- Use pre-built templates to automate workflows for marketing, HR, finance, and operations. Imagine deploying an HR “policy mentor” that answers questions about benefits or PTO rules through the gateway, which logs anonymized FAQs for HR improvement.
- Create chatbots and virtual assistants, all assigned to specific roles, to resolve inquiries, route support tickets, and provide responsive service. Imagine a bilingual call center that uses a transcription AI, with the gateway ensuring no sensitive audio data is sent to external services.
- Help finance and legal teams quickly pull key insights from financial documents, making board reports and audits faster. Imagine scanning a financial statement and instantly surfacing every transaction above a specified threshold, all while the gateway blocks the document from being uploaded.
- Enable operations managers to create standard operating procedures (SOPs), ensuring consistency across the organization. Imagine generating SOPs for onboarding, IT setup, and safety protocols for a new office rollout, all using an approved AI model.
Leveraging AI is an enticing proposition for any business, but without strategic planning and governance, it can be as much a liability as an asset. By implementing a modern security gateway, you can help ensure AI becomes a secure, compliant, and value-driven asset, supporting both your bottom line and regulators alike.
Contact sales@integraone.com to find out how you can secure your AI with a modern security gateway.
