Multicloud security and application delivery company F5 Inc. and data security company Forcepoint LLC today announced a new partnership designed to help enterprises secure artificial intelligence across its lifecycle, from foundational data discovery and classification through runtime protection and continuous assurance.

The partnership seeks to address the issue whereby, as organizations rapidly deploy AI across copilots, assistants and automated workflows, security practices are struggling to keep pace. The rise of AI has created complex challenges in identifying where sensitive data resides, how it flows through AI systems, and the potential risks introduced during production.

The companies argue that while data governance, application security and runtime protections remain crucial, they commonly operate in silos and, in doing so, create gaps between security policy and AI behavior in practice.

The new partnership addresses the issue by combining Forcepoint’s AI-native Data Security Posture Management data discovery and classification capabilities with F5’s AI Red Team and AI Guardrails functionality in the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform. Combined, the services provide runtime protections for AI applications, application programming interfaces, models and agents to help organizations operationalize AI safely while maintaining control and visibility over sensitive enterprise data.

With the joint solution, security teams can now identify and address data vulnerabilities in real time and prioritize AI use cases based on risk. Other delivery features include enforcement of runtime controls over AI interactions and the ability to monitor systems for misuse or abnormal behavior.

Additional continuous telemetry and policy validation also provide ongoing assurance that AI systems are operating securely and in line with enterprise governance requirements.

“By combining Forcepoint’s deep data intelligence and contextual awareness with F5’s advanced application security and runtime protections, organizations can not only eliminate operational security gaps but also achieve unmatched confidence and control in their AI operations,” said F5 Chief Marketing Officer John Maddison.

The F5-Forcepoint partnership also addresses other challenges faced by organizations adopting AI: knowing which data should be accessible to AI systems, which use cases present the greatest risk and how to enforce policies once AI applications are in production. The combined offering treats AI security as a continuous lifecycle, connecting data understanding with runtime enforcement to address the challenge.

The joint offering starts with Forcepoint allowing organizations to discover, classify, prioritize and govern sensitive and business-critical data across cloud, software-as-a-service, endpoint and enterprise data environments. F5 then secures AI systems at runtime by enforcing policies across APIs, gateways, applications and AI agents.

The F5 AI Red Team and F5 AI Guardrails functionality within F5 ADSP also allow customers to secure AI models through monitoring and adversarial testing capabilities.

With the joint solution, customers can defend against threat actors by detecting prompt abuse, preventing data exfiltration and protecting AI models and workloads from emerging threats.

“F5 and Forcepoint are establishing a new standard of continuous, adaptive protection that follows data from the moment of creation through every stage of its lifecycle, including the runtime layer where AI systems operate, evolve and expand risk vectors,” said Naveen Palavalli, chief product and marketing officer at Forcepoint. “The threats AI brings requires a new category for proactive data and AI risk mitigation and our partnership is delivering on this today.”

F5 will be demonstrating the joint solution with Forcepoint at the RSAC Conference in San Francisco March 23-26.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE