How Google Cloud's AI Protection Keeps Enterprise AI Safe

AI adoption does wonders for the modern enterprise environment. It drives efficiency, automates tasks to allow employees to focus on adding value, enhances decision making and brings greater innovation. 

But there’s a catch: threat actors also benefit from the increased abilities AI brings.

As businesses increase their use and application of the technology, AI-related security has become a key concern. Specifically, if not managed appropriately AI increases complexity, expands attack surfaces and creates new vulnerabilities. 

Google Cloud knows this only too well. In the company’s 2025 Cybersecurity Forecast, released in late 2024, it identified the increased use of AI by cybercriminals as a significant concern. 

The report outlined several worries for organisations, including the growing use of AI and large language models (LLMs) to automate attacks such as phishing and social engineering. 

Other threats include increased identity theft, AI’s ability to produce deepfakes for fraudulent activities and a focus on attacking AI applications as a means of entry to networks.

To mitigate these threats and ensure organisations can drive sustainable and safe AI adoption, Google Cloud has introduced AI Protection, a new solution that helps businesses mitigate risk throughout the AI lifecycle.

Safeguarding enterprise AI

AI Protection provides users with a suite of capabilities designed to safeguard AI workloads and data across clouds and models, irrespective of platform. 

It represents Google Cloud’s commitment to helping customers confidently build and deploy AI in a secure, compliant and private way. 

AI Protection integrates with Google Cloud’s Security Command Centre, a multi-cloud risk management platform that includes virtual red teaming and built-in response capabilities. It is powered by Google’s Gemini AI.

SCC brings together proactive and reactive security in one centralised location. This provides organisations with effective posture management and threat detection for code, identities and data.

By bringing AI Protection into SCC, Google Cloud enables security teams to have a singular overview of their AI posture and deliver holistic management of AI risk in the context of other cloud risks. 

Comprehensive risk management

AI Protection gives security teams a multifaceted approach to managing AI risk across inventory, assets and threats.

Discussing the foundational importance of understanding AI inventory in a Google blog announcing the launch of AI Protection, Archana Ramamoorthy, Senior Director, Product Management at Google Cloud Security says: “Effective AI risk management begins with a comprehensive understanding of where and how AI is used within your environment.

“Our capabilities help you automatically discover and catalogue AI assets, including the use of models, applications, and data — and their relationships.”

Understanding the data that supports AI applications and how it is protected is essential for security teams. AI Protection helps understand data sensitivity and data types. It can generate deep insight into the type and sensitivity of training data. 

By doing so, it is able to identify AI-related toxic combinations and possible compromise points for threat actors, then recommend actions to mitigate risk.

To secure AI assets, AI Protection uses Model Armor. This is a fully managed Google Cloud service that enhances the security and safety of AI applications by screening prompts and responses related to security and safety risks. 

Within AI Protection, it helps security teams to guard against prompt injection, data loss, jailbreak, offensive content and malicious URLs. 

"We are using Model Armor not only because it provides robust protection against prompt injections, jailbreaks and sensitive data leaks, but because we're getting a unified security posture from Security Command Center,” explains Jay DePaul, chief cybersecurity and technology risk officer, Dun & Bradstreet 

“We can quickly identify, prioritise and respond to potential vulnerabilities — without impacting the experience of our development teams or the apps themselves.”

Managing AI threats

Successfully mitigating the impact of cyberattack relies on the rapid detection, investigation and response to threats against AI systems. 

AI Protection delivers this capability by operationalising security intelligence and research from Google and cyber defence firm Mandiant. 

Advanced detectors help to uncover initial access attempts privilege escalation and persistence attempts for AI workloads. 

"As AI-driven solutions become increasingly commonplace, securing AI systems is paramount and surpasses basic data protection,” says Dr Grace Trinidad, research director, IDC 

“AI security — by its nature — necessitates a holistic strategy that includes model integrity, data provenance, compliance and robust governance. By taking a holistic approach to AI protection, Google Cloud simplifies, thus improves the experience of securing AI for customers.”

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