The AI and machine learning revolution is here. According to McKinsey’s state of the AI report, the adoption and usage of AI across organizations has more than doubled in the past five years. Data scientists and engineers want to bring models to production faster to deploy more AI applications but may not be familiar with how to secure AI infrastructure against modern cloud attacks. In addition, CIOs and CISOs are often concerned with the unknown risks of AI and machine learning in their businesses and may not even know when business units begin building new AI projects. Today’s AI tools are evolving rapidly and enable data scientists to move faster than ever, but they can also introduce new attack surfaces and vulnerabilities, making it critical to proactively prevent cyberattacks when building and managing machine learning models. 

At Wiz, we want to help security teams empower their data scientists and engineers to deploy more useful AI applications faster and responsibly. Today, we are proud to announce that Wiz is extending support for Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, including support for customers to build, deploy, and scale ML models in Vertex AI, access to Vertex AI Workbench, and more. Now, Wiz customers can build, train, and deploy ML models at scale while ensuring they are effectively monitoring and managing the security risks associated with managing AI/ML models. 

Wiz provides an inventory of all the Vertex AI capabilities without agents, and the Wiz Security Graph provides a real-time visual summary of the services that are being used so customers can monitor for security health. For example, Wiz allows Vertex AI customers to identify misconfigurations, external exposure, sensitive data, and identity risks behind Vertex AI services. For User-Managed Workbench, Wiz can also find vulnerabilities and secrets in Google Compute Engine behind Vertex AI. 

Vertex AI provides businesses with a platform to quickly build, deploy, and scale ML models, reducing training costs and time to production. Our collaboration with Wiz will enable joint customers to effectively monitor and manage the security of AI models they deploy through Vertex AI, utilizing Wiz Security Graph and other tools to identify misconfigurations, security risks, and more.

Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Director of Vertex AI Product Management, Google Cloud 

One key use case is protecting the AI pipeline from data leakage. Using the Wiz Security Graph, our attack path visualization shows how an external organization user could gain access to models based on sensitive data. Organizations can easily detect data leakage by identifying which machine learning models trained on sensitive datasets have exposure through endpoints with misconfigured permissions. Wiz also protects customers using Vertex AI from data poisoning, which could influence the models and produce unintended data issues. This can also help prevent attackers from uploading false data to the storage bucket where the model is trained.  

Another example is the unknown security risks on a Vertex AI User-Managed Workbench. With Wiz, customers can see additional risk context associated with their underlying infrastructure of Vertex AI Workbench such as vulnerabilities, public internet exposure, secrets, usage of a service account with access to other Google Cloud services, and other cloud providers that could lead to lateral movement. Once these risks are identified, Wiz provides remediation guidance for customers. Through our integrations, security teams can easily send an alert to Splunk, a notification to Slack, or an alert on Google Cloud’s Pub/Sub. 

One company that is pulling this together is OVO. They use Wiz to help their data scientists and engineers move AI into full-scale production. 

Our data scientists and engineers use Vertex AI to build innovative AI-powered applications for our business units. Wiz provides us with full visibility across resources and helps protect our AI infrastructure from security risks.

Ashley Dunn, Head of Security Engineering, OVO

In short, Wiz support for Vertex AI allows you to: 

• Have full visibility into your cloud technology usage, so your data scientists and ML engineers can focus on innovative code to build AI-powered applications 

• Develop AI applications securely and minimize risk by preventing attacks on machine learning models with sensitive information 

• Accelerate machine learning models into production, while we protect your AI infrastructure  

Start unleashing your AI innovation today 

Our goal is to help protect your organization’s AI infrastructure and minimize security risks so your teams can focus on bringing more machine learning models to production and accelerate your business’s AI innovation. You can learn more by visiting our Wiz docs (login required). If you prefer a live demo, we would love to connect with you.