LeakSignal

Strengthening Data Protection and Governance for AI Applications is a guidance article from F5 describing how data protection and governance capabilities are evolving to address AI-enabled workloads. The piece explains the challenges of protecting data in highly distributed AI environments and introduces upcoming enhancements to the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform, achieved through the acquisition of LeakSignal. The goal is real-time visibility into data flows, precise data classification, policy-driven enforcement, and continuous governance across multicloud environments, APIs, traditional applications, and AI/ML components. The article highlights how these capabilities will help organizations manage sensitive data—whether it’s training inputs or user inputs to generative AI models—while maintaining compliance with data privacy regulations.

Key Vision and Capabilities

• Real-time data classification and analysis to identify data types and destinations within data flows.
• Policy-driven enforcement and incident response to actively control data movement and respond to potential violations.
• Continuous monitoring and governance with ongoing auditing to ensure regulatory compliance across multicloud setups and AI-enabled architectures.
• Integration of LeakSignal’s data governance and protection capabilities into the F5 Platform to protect data in APIs, traditional and AI applications, and endpoints; enable mediation of data input/output for large language models (LLMs).
• Broad applicability across data in transit, at rest, and during API interactions, spanning enterprise, cloud, and edge environments.

How It Works (High-Level)

1. Real-time data classification and analysis to identify data types and sensitive content in transit.
2. Policy-driven controls to manage risks and enforce protective measures across data flows.
3. Continuous monitoring and governance with ongoing auditing to sustain compliance in dynamic AI-driven ecosystems.
4. Integrated protection across APIs, applications, endpoints, and LLM data inputs/outputs through the combined F5 and LeakSignal capabilities.

What This Enables

• Safer data handling for AI-powered applications, including safeguarding training data and user inputs.
• Compliance across regulatory standards in multicloud environments.
• Improved observability and control over data movement in complex, distributed architectures.
• Ability to mitigate data leakage and enforce data protection policies in real-time as data traverses APIs, services, and AI models.

Core Features

• Real-time data classification and analysis across data flows
• Policy-driven enforcement and incident response for rapid risk mitigation
• Continuous monitoring and governance with ongoing auditing
• Integration of LeakSignal-based data protection into the F5 platform
• Data protection for APIs, traditional applications, AI/ML workloads, and endpoints
• Mediation of data input and output for large language models (LLMs)
• Multicloud visibility and enforcement with end-to-end data governance

Safety and Compliance Focus

• Emphasizes protecting sensitive data in transit and ensuring regulatory compliance in AI-enabled environments
• Aims to reduce data exposure risks while enabling secure AI innovation

How this Fits into F5’s Platform

• Integrates with the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform to provide unified data protection across modern applications, APIs, and AI workloads
• Extends existing security, performance, and insight capabilities with governance and data protection enhancements inspired by LeakSignal

Learn More

• For organizations accelerating AI deployments, these capabilities are designed to close data protection gaps and empower secure, data-driven innovation across multicloud infrastructures.