As businesses increasingly fuse artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations, the demand for AI-powered applications has skyrocketed. Today, 75% of organizations report they are implementing AI assistance.1 But in the rush to add intelligence, they’re also running into security risks and operational challenges, often due to an incomplete AI strategy.
Let’s examine how you can simplify building, securing, and optimizing AI-powered apps to make the most of your investments.
Building AI-powered applications
AI applications are modern apps with extra complexity. They consist of multiple components, such as inference engines, data sources, and machine learning models, that frequently use Kubernetes architectures and are connected via APIs.
Your developers are likely well-versed in building modern apps, but the AI models needed can prove problematic. Building and training AI models often requires specialized skills that not every organization has. In response, a new market for Cloud AI Developer Services (CAIDS) has emerged. With these services, developers can use AI models through familiar means, such as APIs, SDKs, or applications, to embed intelligence with less effort.
AWS offers multiple CAIDS offerings to streamline the development of intelligent apps. These include services for building and training AI models as well as a selection of pre-built models to choose from. In addition, AWS provides the foundational infrastructure needed to build AI applications, with options for serverless computing, managed Kubernetes, and scalable compute power. These services allow developers to build AI models and apps faster with integration into reliable infrastructure.
Securing applications and AI models
Now you have an easier way to build AI-powered apps, but how do you secure them?
When it comes to AI concerns, model security is second only to cost.2 Apps have access to the AI model and its sensitive data, making them targets for attackers. Model poisoning is another worry that can result in bad outputs or can disrupt performance. Threat actors aren’t the only concern—you must protect against accidental data exposure, as well. For example, users may provide their own personally identifiable information (PII) to the app that you don’t want to end up in the model.
F5 security solutions protect your AI apps and models against all these scenarios. As an AWS partner, F5 solutions can be easily added to your AWS environment, as well as anywhere else your AI apps or models live.
F5 also defends the APIs that connect apps, AI models, and data sources. By safeguarding these connections, you ensure that only authorized traffic can access the model or data sources, preventing data exfiltration and abuse.
Monitoring inputs and outputs is also necessary to ensure your AI apps operate as expected. Observing inputs prevents prompt injection attacks or accidental PII exposure by legitimate users. Examining outputs can prevent your AI app from providing biased or hallucinated responses that could harm your organization’s reputation.
Optimizing performance and cost
Balancing AI app performance and cost is tricky. On one hand, these applications require significant computational resources to function effectively; on the other, the costs associated with compute resources can escalate quickly. Maximizing performance for users also requires getting apps closer to them, meaning your infrastructure likely needs to include edge sites.
AWS provides the scalable infrastructure necessary to support AI workloads, while F5’s load balancing solutions supply intelligent traffic routing, reducing latency and improving response times. F5 can also connect apps or microservices that are distributed across multiple clouds or edge sites to simplify getting apps closer to your users without sacrificing protection. This not only enhances the user experience but also ensures that resources are used efficiently, helping to control costs.
Achieving your AI goals
As AI continues to play an increasingly critical role for businesses, the ability to manage costs, mitigate risks, and deliver exceptional performance will be crucial to maintaining a competitive edge. F5 and AWS provide the essential tools and services to achieve these goals, helping organizations fully realize the benefits of their AI investments.
Learn more at f5.com/aws.
Sources
1. F5, 2024 State of AI Application Strategy Report, Jun. 2024
2. Ibid.
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