Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The 21st-century gold rush is the AI boom, and it is producing a wave of emerging AI companies. Being the first to build and apply AI in novel ways successfully is the difference between success and failure. Because of this, companies can find themselves making a trade-off between time-to-market and security.

This blog post is adapted from a recent episode of The Cloudcast podcast featuring Rohan Sathe, CEO and co-founder of Nightfall AI. Listen to the full conversation here. Your employees are uploading company documents to ChatGPT. Your healthcare teams are transcribing sensitive call recordings and feeding them into LLMs. Your finance department is pasting confidential spreadsheets into publicly accessible AI tools. And unless you have visibility into these workflows, you have no idea it's happening.

Modern applications are constantly exposed to various malicious activities, including credential stuffing, API abuse, and advanced injection attacks. Many of these threats can be stopped at the network edge, before they ever reach your application. That’s why Datadog App and API Protection offers real-time threat detection and blocking for popular edge proxies and load balancers, which include integrations for Envoy, Istio, NGINX, and Google Cloud Load Balancers (using Google Service Extensions).

This article is part of a monthly LevelBlue series that explores the evolving world of AI governance, trust, and responsibility. Each month, we look at how organizations can use artificial intelligence safely, thoughtfully, and with lasting impact. Artificial intelligence has moved from being an experiment to becoming an expectation. It now shapes how decisions are made, how customers are supported, and how innovation happens. As AI grows in influence, so does the need to manage it wisely.

AI is everywhere. I live in San Francisco, and a day doesn’t go by that I don’t see a billboard, an advertisement on the side of a bus, or a tech bro’s hoodie with two big letters on it: AI. It’s no different in cybersecurity marketing – AI terminology is everywhere. But too often, it’s tacked on as a buzzword – a thin layer washed on top of existing security tools, with little real impact. This makes it tricky to decipher what’s real and what’s hype.

When it comes to massive files, many organizations still rely on old-fashioned, on-premises file servers and filers. They’re hesitant to work on these projects in the cloud because the inherent network latency makes working with massive files difficult. So they stick to an on-premises approach—even though it typically requires wired access and stable VPN connections, which makes sharing and collaborating especially challenging for people working from home, in the field, or on the road.