By:- Eyal Sachyani, Head of Global Delivery, Check Point Services
As organizations accelerate AI adoption, AI introduces new security considerations, but it can also amplify existing weaknesses such as excessive permissions, misconfigurations, and poor data governance. Without the right security guardrails, these gaps can create broader exposure as AI gains access to more systems, applications, and data.
Check Point Services' Security Hardening Assessment combines automated validation and expert review to identify configuration gaps, prioritize remediation, and provide continuous visibility into security controls over time.
How AI Expands the Attack Surface
AI initiatives don't operate in isolation. They connect to collaboration platforms, internal knowledge repositories, business applications, cloud environments, APIs, third-party tools, and large volumes of enterprise data. Each connection can create a new access path, and each access path depends on the strength of the underlying security controls.
As organizations introduce AI assistants, copilots, plugins, service accounts, automated workflows, and data connectors, the attack surface expands beyond traditional users and systems, with AI-related security incidents expected to account for up to 25% of enterprise breaches by 2028. AI can make information easier to find, summarize, and redistribute, which means weak permissions, misconfigured integrations, and poor segmentation can create broader exposure than originally intended.
Why Security Hardening Matters for AI
AI often exposes or amplifies weaknesses that already exist in the environment. For example, an AI assistant connected to internal business systems may inherit excessive permissions from a misconfigured service account, exposing sensitive information to a broader set of users than intended. What might have been a contained configuration issue can become a larger risk when AI is given access to multiple systems and data sources.
Check Point's Security Hardening Assessment helps identify excessive permissions, weak access controls, exposed data paths, monitoring gaps, and configuration drift before they become security risks, helping organizations scale AI with confidence.
Security Prerequisites Before Scaling AI
Before expanding AI access across the enterprise, organizations should validate that foundational controls are in place and operating effectively. By establishing a secure, governed, and resilient foundation, organizations can accelerate AI adoption while maintaining control over risk. Security Hardening Assessment provides visibility into the critical security controls that support AI readiness, including:
- Validation of identity and access controls across users, administrators, service accounts, and AI integrations
- Verification of least-privilege access to ensure AI tools only retrieve data users and workflows are authorized to access
- Review of sensitive data exposure, classification, and access paths before connecting data sources to AI systems
- Confirmation of logging, monitoring, and alerting coverage across AI-connected applications, APIs, and cloud services
- Establishment and continuous validation of configuration baselines as users, applications, and integrations change
From Point-in-Time Assessments to Continuous Validation
Identifying a configuration gap is only the beginning. As new users, applications, and data sources are introduced, organizations need confidence that security controls remain effective over time. Traditional assessments provide a snapshot of risk at a single point in time, but environments continue to change long after the assessment is complete.
Security Hardening Assessment delivers ongoing visibility through automated validation across more than 50 hardening controls, continuous identification of configuration gaps, expert-led analysis and prioritized remediation guidance, and compliance reporting to support governance and audit readiness. This enables organizations to continuously manage risk and maintain confidence as AI adoption expands.
Turning Findings into Action
This new Check Point Services offering prioritizes findings based on risk and business impact, enabling teams to focus on remediation efforts where they matter most.
As Eitan Lugassi-Gilad, VP, Check Point Services, explains: “Configuration drift is inevitable in dynamic environments. The challenge isn’t finding every issue manually. It’s understanding which issues matter most and addressing them before they become real exposure.”
The organizations that succeed with AI won’t be those that move fastest, but those that scale securely. Security Hardening Assessment helps organizations identify and address security gaps early, creating the visibility and resilience needed to adopt AI with confidence.
The Check Point Services Advantage
Check Point Services helps organizations prepare for AI-driven change by combining security expertise, threat intelligence, risk assessment, proactive monitoring, professional services, Managed Detection and Response and training. This end-to-end approach supports customers from initial assessment and design through ongoing optimization and response, helping security teams reduce exposure, strengthen operational readiness, and maintain confidence as AI adoption expands across the enterprise.
