Prevent AI Data Leaks with the Right Tools

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As leaders of small and midsize organizations, we need to operate efficiently and effectively within a range of security constraints. Laws, regulations, industry standards, and contractual obligations set expectations and, in most cases, impose requirements on how we manage and run our business and IT. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) adds a new layer of security challenges.

AI is most effective when it has access to a broad range of relevant information. However, that access must be carefully limited to authorized users, creating a delicate balancing act.

AI data leaks occur when AI tools and systems expose information to unauthorized users or share it inappropriately. These leaks can happen internally or externally, and may be accidental or intentional.

Preventing AI data leaks requires actively governing permissions and access, along with choosing AI tools that align with your security and privacy requirements.

Setup AI Data Governance

The days of “set and forget” permissions are over. At the macro level, AI data governance requires actively managing access controls and permissions settings.

Begin by reviewing and auditing your current access controls and permissions settings. It is common for users to rely on default sharing settings or to adjust permissions for convenience, often extending access inappropriately. While people may not actively search for and find private information, AI will.

Running an audit tool and resetting permissions can help close these gaps and provide a fresh starting point. Once permissions are properly configured, advanced security tools enable ongoing monitoring to identify new threats as they emerge. These tools can notify users and administrators of potential issues and modify permission changes to reduce risk.

Pick Secure AI Tools

With data access controls and permissions properly secured, the next step is ensuring that the AI tools and systems you use do not put your data at risk.

When selecting AI tools, look for the following attributes:Connect with a Cloud Advisor

1. Adheres to Security Standards

Include security as a critical criteria when selecting your AI tools and systems. Verify that the AI tools you pick adhere to industry and regulatory security standards.

2. Does NOT Train Models Without Permission

Never use an AI tool that trains their models without your permission. These tools effectively absorb anything you input and incorporate it into their models, potentially exposing your data to other users.

3. Does NOT Allow Human Data Review Outside Your Domain

Avoid AI tools and systems that allow humans outside of your organization to see or use data you have entered into the system. Even if these systems are not using your data to train their models, if others can see it, then it is not secure.

4. Does NOT Sell or Use Data for Other Purposes

Choose AI tools and systems that do not sell or use your data for purposes beyond providing the service. Outside of training, some AI tools mine data for sale to others for research, marketing, and other purposes.

The general rule of thumb is: If you pay, your data is private. If the tool is free, so is your data.

However, some paid AI tools still include terms and conditions that allow data collection and usage. Before moving forward with any AI tool or system, always check the fine print.

How We Help

Schedule an intro meeting with one of our Cloud Advisors. Our team can discuss how you can assess your risk, create effective policies, and select tools that deliver productive, secure, and affordable AI solutions. The meeting is free and without obligation.

About the Author

Bill Seybolt bio pictureBill is a Senior Cloud Advisor responsible for helping small and midsize organizations with productive, security, and secure managed cloud services. Bill works with executives, leaders, and team members to understand workflows, identify strategic goals and tactical requirements, and design solutions and implementation phases. Having helped hundreds of organizations successfully adopt cloud solutions, his expertise and working style ensure a comfortable experience and effective change management.

IT Strategy & Planning: Where You Want IT to Be in 2026

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(12/16/25) – With significant changes to our productivity tools, the Artificial Intelligence explosion, and increasing expectations for security and compliance, how are your IT strategy and planning adapting for the coming year? Let productivity, security, and affordability drive your IT strategy and plans for 2026.

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Turn AI Prompts Into Business Outcomes

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving rapidly, providing you with powerful tools that can transform how your organization operates. By integrating it into your daily workflows, you can make smarter decisions and streamline tasks that once took significant time to complete. Over time, AI will produce measurable results that are easy to track and analyze.

How AI Can Work for You

You get the most value from AI when you apply it to targeted, repeatable processes that address real business needs. For example, regularly analyzing meeting transcripts with AI can uncover actionable insights and identify trends that guide your business strategy.

AI can also assist in creating communications and marketing content that reflect your brand’s voice. Moreover, it can generate structured agendas or talking points for sales conversations, allowing you to emphasize client relationships and highlight your business’s strengths.

By making AI a regular part of your workflows, you can continuously refine outputs and achieve more accurate results over time.

Getting Started with AI

Connect with a Cloud Advisor
For those just starting out with AI, begin with smaller projects. For example, try using AI to automate follow-ups or analyze customer feedback. These use cases will help your team become familiar with AI while still delivering immediate impact. Over time, incorporate AI into more complex processes.

Give your organization the opportunity to explore its full potential without disrupting daily operations.

You should regularly monitor AI outputs to make sure that the technology and uses align with your goals. Tracking data usage also helps you keep information secure and will help maintain trust.

Crafting Effective Prompts

Once you are familiar with AI, you can unlock its full potential by providing clear context and direction. You and your team should know how to craft a prompt that helps AI fully understand your objectives and your voice.

A strong prompt includes the following elements:

  1. Persona: Decide the role you want AI to take on. Defining a persona helps shape the perspective, tone, and level of expertise AI uses in its response.
  2. Backstory: Share context about your business, your customers, and the tone or results you expect.
  3. Task: Be specific about what you want AI to produce. Include your brand voice, target audience, and any formatting preferences.

For example, you might ask AI to take on the persona of a knowledgeable and approachable communications expert. Then, provide it with the backstory of your company and set a confident, friendly tone aimed at small business owners. Finally, be clear about the task, such as writing a professional announcement in your brand voice. Be sure to include any formatting preferences, like short paragraphs for easy readability.

Using AI Responsibly

In order to adopt AI responsibly, pay careful attention to sensitive business and client information. Selecting AI tools that meet strong standards for privacy, security, and compliance helps you protect this information and maintain trust with your clients and stakeholders. Beyond selecting the right tools, establish clear protocols to guide your team’s use of AI.

Your policies should:

  1. Define safe usage: Clearly outline how AI should be used across your organization. Clear safe usage guidelines prevent misuse and ensures your team can confidently rely on AI.
  2. Ensure compliance with regulations: Establish rules that keep your organization aligned with legal, industry standards, and contractual obligations. These rules should address the protection of sensitive client information, along with adherence to data privacy laws and governance policies.
  3. Encourage creative applications: Support your team in exploring innovative approaches to problem-solving. Creative applications and use cases allow your organization to maximize the benefits of AI while generating tangible results.

AI is a powerful tool that can enhance business processes and strengthen client relationships. When it is used properly, your organization can achieve meaningful and lasting results.

How We Help

You can dive deeper into crafting effective prompts by viewing our November 2025 3T@3 Series session, “How To: Better AI Results” and several eBooks and other resources in our Resource Center. Our Cloud Advisors are here to help you plan, execute, and succeed. Book some time and start your journey.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America.

How To: Better AI Results

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(11/18/25) – If what you put into AI is not clear, what you get out will lack clarity. If your use case – your “why” for using AI – is not clear, you will not get the outcomes you want. AI is most effective when you define meaningful use cases and use well-designed prompts.

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Improve Your Gen AI Adoption

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Generative Artificial Intelligence, or Gen AI, is here to stay. Gen AI has the potential to dramatically help you run your business. And yet, over 90% of AI efforts fail. Adopting Gen AI – putting it to use in real workflows – is not as easy as we are often led to believe.

You can, securely, improve how your business adopts Gen AI and puts it to use.

In this Coffee & Clouds online event, Cumulus Global CEO Allen Falcon shares four (4) pillars for better AI Adoption. Using these pillars, you can formalize your approach to AI services for better results while protecting your budget.  Allen will also share guidance on AI security as it relates to your choice of AI tools and services. 

Invest 15 to 20 minutes to understand how you can be more efficient and effective with your AI service decisions.

Join us live or view the recording on-demand, and the Dunkin’ or Starbucks is on us.

A 5-Step Strategy for Responsible AI

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5-Step Strategy for Responsible AI

AI is changing how our businesses operate and compete. As we rely more on AI, having strong governance is essential to ensure our AI tools are used securely, ethically, and responsibly. Our use of AI should align with your company’s values and regulatory standards.

By setting clear policies and accountability, you can reduce risks like data breaches, ethical issues, and noncompliance. Strong governance also prevents unauthorized AI use, making sure that every AI activity supports your business goals.

1 Create Comprehensive AI Use Policies

Unauthorized AI use, or Shadow AI, creates serious risks for your business. To manage Shadow AI and other risks, you need visibility, control, and guidance for your team. A well-crafted AI Usage Policy reduces the chance of mistakes or misuse and helps you responsibly manage AI usage.

Your AI usage policies should:

  • Define allowed and unallowed use of AI as a tool/resource
  • Outline principles for ethical and appropriate use
  • Specify security guidelines to ensure data protection and compliance with regulations, industry standards, and contractual obligations

Your policies should also clearly state:

  • How your team should handle your company data
  • How your team should handle and protect third party data
  • Which AI tools are approved
  • When and how team members may use external AI resources

2 Implement and Monitor Controls

Implementing access controls and monitoring systems helps you identify when AI tools are being used outside approved channels.

Create processes for:

  • Your team to request access to AI tools and services
  • Evaluating requested tools for applicable use cases, usability, security, and cost
  • Deploying new AI tools and services, including education and training

Periodically audit your environment to spot unauthorized applications before they create problems. 

Work with your team to move to authorized AI tools that provide the same capabilities or review and select a solution you can secure and support.

3 Ensure Legal and Regulatory Compliance

Compliance is a key aspect of responsible AI use. Your AI practices need to follow data privacy laws, industry regulations, and contractual obligations. 

Begin by identifying and reviewing relevant laws, industry standards, and contractual obligations related to data privacy. Identify any specific conditions or requirements related to the use of AI services.

You want to be able to demonstrate and document your compliance. Review the security compliance certifications and practices of your AI services and tools. Collect the necessary information, including how your AI tools collect, store, and use data. 

Regular audits will help catch potential issues, particularly with Shadow AI. 

Stay current with evolving legislation to ensure that your AI practices remain compliant over time.

4 Prioritize Ethical AI Practices

Ethical AI builds trust and protects your reputation. When you prioritize ethics, you show that your business values integrity and fairness, strengthening relationships with clients and stakeholders.

  • Regularly review your AI models and the data they use to remove bias and ensure transparency in decision-making. In addition to bias detection and mitigation, AI training should include diverse data sources and that results are not skewed by inherent biases.
  • Make sure your AI is fair, explainable, and accountable, so your team and clients can trust its outcomes. AI tools should articulate results and decisions in human-understandable terms. People need to be able to understand the rationale behind the AI results.
  • Ensure you have human judgement and intervention at every stage of your AI journey. Clear lines of responsibility provide accountability. Human review prevents over-use of AI, particularly in decision-making. Encourage feedback from employees, clients, and other stakeholders.

5 Train and Support Your Team

Your AI strategy will only succeed if your team knows how to use AI safely and effectively. When your team is confident in using AI, you maximize its benefits while minimizing risks.

Provide training and support that covers technical skills, applicability to relevant use cases, and ethical considerations. 

Support strategies include:

  • Offering training sessions and user guides.
  • Providing a dedicated support team for questions.
  • Offering ongoing learning opportunities as AI evolves.

How We Help

Using AI securely and ethically requires careful planning and ongoing effort. Our Cloud Advisors can help you identify use cases, select tools and services, endure data security and government, and help your team get the most from your AI investments.

About the Author

Bill Seybolt bio pictureBill is a Senior Cloud Advisor responsible for helping small and midsize organizations with cloud forward solutions that meet their business needs, priorities, and budgets. Bill works with executives, leaders, and team members to understand workflows, identify strategic goals and tactical requirements, and design solutions and implementation phases. Having helped over 200 organizations successfully adopt cloud solutions, his expertise and working style ensure a comfortable experience effective change management.

Unleash the Power of NotebookLM

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eBook | Source: Google– NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant who reads and understands your private data. This Google eBook walks you through how NotebookLM can empower your teams to work smarter, not harder.

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5 Cyber Threat Trends You Should Know

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5 Security Cyber Threats You Should Know

Earlier this week, we shared CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report which identified five (5) cyber threat trends that you should know. While cyber-fatigue is real, understanding the threat landscape helps you assess your risks and security posture and make informed decisions on how to prioritize security-related spending and investment.

5 Cyber Threat Trends

Here are the 5 cyber threat trends you should know.

1 China on the Rise

Cyber attacks originating in China – both nation-state and organized crime – jumped 130% over the prior 12 months. At the enterprise-level, China-nexus attackers focus on telecommunication systems. For most businesses, the increase in attacks on unmanaged devices should be of concern. 

Unmanaged devices lack detection and response capabilities that allow attackers to lurk, monitor, and capture credentials for greater access to your systems, applications, and data.

2 Hands-On-Keyboard Attacks are Making a Comeback

The best way for cyber attackers to avoid modern malware protection, such next-gen endpoint protection and managed detection and response (MDR) services, is for the attacker or a surrogate to use the keyboard. These manual, interactive attacks are up 27% over the prior year.

We may imagine hands–on-keyboard attacks as movie-like scenarios of corporate spies posing as custodians sneaking onto computers while avoiding the security guards making their rounds. In reality, the hands-on-attack may be your employee responding to somebody they think is IT support or a vendor helping them solve a problem.

3 Rapid Ransomware Reach

The speed at which cyber attackers can launch ransomware attacks after an initial breach is accelerating. From breach to spread, attacks are up to 32% faster than previously known.

This speed gives cybersecurity systems less time to identify behaviors and patterns that identify the cyber attack, weakening the effectiveness of the protections.

4 AI for Evil

With the help of AI, certain types of cyber attacks have jumped 220% over the prior year. Cyber attackers are using generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) technologies to power more-effective attacks.  

Using GenAI, attackers create more realistic fakes – emails, documents, phone calls, and videos – to trigger responses and reactions that enable and facilitate access and breaches.

At the same time, cyber attackers are using security vulnerabilities in the platforms and tools businesses use to build AI agents, just as they use vulnerabilities in web, application, and office productivity platforms.

5 Cloud Attacks Gain Altitude

Cloud intrusions – successful cyber attacks on cloud systems and services – jumped 136% during the first half of 2025 compared to all of 2024. These attacks vector through compromised identities, improper security configurations, API vulnerabilities, lax security and permissions governance.

Steps You Can Take

To ensure your security footprint protects your business appropriately:

  • Conduct IT and Security Assessments that benchmark your security posture.
  • Prioritize your risks based on the nature and size of your business, industry standards and expectations, and regulatory requirements.
  • Level our Security CPR® model and managed services to plan, prioritize, and implement appropriate security and business resilience solutions that:
    • Address your prioritized risks as your budget allows
    • Protect from the most common and the most damaging/costly types of attacks.

We Will Help

Plan Now; Act Soon. Our Cloud Advisors are here to assist. We will:

  • Review your current systems and services and prioritize your risks. 
  • Help you prioritize, plan, and budget for security changes and improvements that may be necessary or preferred
  • Deploy and co-manage your security solutions to keep you protected.

Schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors now to begin your security review and improvements.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America.

AI in Google Workspace – AI Ultra for Business

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Google AI Ultra for BusinessGoogle Workspace is a comprehensive and secure platform that empowers organizations to be more productive, collaborative, and creative. This series explores the power of AI built within Google Workspace across each of the workspace apps. In this post, we cover the Google AI Ultra add-on for Google Workspace.

Google AI Ultra for Business

Google AI Ultra for Business is an add-on for existing Google Workspace Business and Enterprise subscribers, offering enhanced capabilities.  Beyond the highest access to the Gemini app, Google AI Ultra for Business delivers advanced tools for deep reasoning, images, and videos.

Here are 4 reasons to consider Google Ultra for Business:

1 Gemini App
  • Dive deep with the most capable models, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Deep Research.
  • Deep Think, with the ability to explore multiple scenarios and answers before responding, is coming soon.
2 Video Generation
  • AI Ultra for Business includes advanced filmmaking tools:
    • Veo 3 — Professional video production tool
    • Flow — Create cinematic scenes using Veo 3
    • Whisk — Image and text to 8-second videos, using Veo 2

3 Project Mariner

  • Research prototype for streamlined human-agent interaction
  • Allows AI agents to handle multiple tasks concurrently
  • Coming soon, initially to the US only

4 Individual YouTube Premium

  • Upgrade your video game with an individual YouTube Premium plan.

And More …

Google AI Ultra for Business also includes higher access and usage limits for:

  • Gemini App
  • Image Generation
  • NotebookLM
  • AI Credits (12,500 credits per month)
  • Storage (30 TB across Photos, Drive, and Gmail

We Will Help

At Cumulus Global, our priority is ensuring that you have productive, secure, and affordable managed cloud services. We work to ensure that you get the most value from the IT and cloud services you need and want, without overspending, to best support your business objectives.

Unsure of where to start? Check out our IT Assessment or schedule a meeting with a Cloud Advisor. We will help you adapt while keeping your IT services secure and cost-effective.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America.

AI in Google Workspace – AppSheet

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Gemini AI in AppSheetGoogle Workspace is a comprehensive and secure platform that empowers organizations to be more productive, collaborative, and creative. This series explores the power of AI built within Google Workspace across each of the workspace apps. In this post, we cover AI in AppSheet.

AI in AppSheet

AppSheet is an add-on for Google Workspace and a Google Cloud service that empowers Google Workspace users to create custom apps and automations without writing code.

In addition to simplifying workflow creation and connecting your business data, AppSheet provides controls needed to remain secure and compliant.

Gemini AI in AppSheet helps you create and refine apps and better access and refine your data and information.

Here are 3 Gemini features in AppSheet you should know.

1 Create an App
  • Bring app ideas to life by simply describing them. Gemini AI in AppSheet can transform those concepts
    into a fully functional app for you to edit or publish.
2 Extract Information
  • Currently in preview, Gemini AI in AppSheet lets you populate forms and reports directly from images. Snap a photo of a receipt, invoice or document to capture data and match it to the right fields.
3 Connect External Services
  • Also in preview, AppSheet apps can connect to hundreds of Google Cloud and third-party services without custom code.

And More …

You can also:

  • Embed Gemini-powered AI tasks directly within your AppSheet automations.
  • Extract information from PDF files.
  • Automatically categorize information as it is input.
  • Route and prioritize items based on categorized content to streamline workflows.

We Will Help

At Cumulus Global, our priority is ensuring that you have productive, secure, and affordable managed cloud services. We work to ensure that you get the most value from the IT and cloud services you need and want, without overspending, to best support your business objectives.

Unsure of where to start? Check out our IT Assessment or schedule a meeting with a Cloud Advisor. We will help you adapt while keeping your IT services secure and cost-effective.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America.