Dell links supply chain security to the challenges of agentic AI

Supply chain security is becoming increasingly critical as businesses integrate AI into their operations. With the rise of autonomous AI agents, traditional security measures are no longer sufficient, as these agents can take multiple steps, access various tools, and communicate with other agents, making their behavior unpredictable. Dell Technologies is addressing this challenge by focusing on AI factory security, ensuring that enterprises can act at the same speed and scale as their AI systems.

Kamlesh Shah, director of product management at Dell AI Factory Solutions, and Ash Lakshmanan, director of product management at Dell Services, discussed these issues during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE Research's AI Cybersecurity and Resilience Summit. They emphasized that traditional security tools often fail to identify agent identities, which is a major gap that needs to be addressed.

Dell advises enterprises to vet suppliers before any product is even conceived and to extend protection throughout the entire life cycle of a deployment.

Shah explained that agents change the threat model because they can perform actions beyond answering questions, such as finding tools, using systems of record, and communicating with other agents. This unpredictability necessitates a different approach to security, with boundaries centered around policy enforcement checks, runtime sandboxing, and telemetry that records authorization. Agents should have narrowly scoped permissions tied to specific workloads rather than broad-based permissions to all applications.

Dell Services assists customers in turning AI deployment use cases into operational environments by securing hardware, runtime, data, and applications across a four-layer stack. A common oversight is observability across all four layers, which is crucial for maintaining security. Dell is also collaborating with Nvidia to bring agentic AI from the deskside to the data center, acknowledging that foundational security elements remain essential, including a layered security approach, continuous observability, and readiness for potential breaches.