Kiteworks
Enabling Zero-Trust Data Exchange in the AI Era

The AI race has fundamentally changed how enterprises think about data protection. Organizations are rushing to deploy large language models and AI-powered workflows, only to discover that traditional security architectures weren’t built for this moment. Sensitive data now flows into AI systems at unprecedented scale.

Every interaction is a potential exposure point; proprietary information fed into prompts, confidential documents analyzed by third-party models, competitive intelligence absorbed into training datasets. Employees are feeding sensitive content into AI tools faster than security teams can establish guardrails. The question is how to embrace AI without hemorrhaging valuable assets.

This challenge sits at the heart of what Kiteworks has built—an AI Data Gateway, Kiteworks Private Data Network (PDN). It helps organizations create a governed channel between their sensitive repositories and AI systems, ensuring only appropriately classified content reaches powerful but potentially risky AI tools. Kiteworks MCP Server extends this protection by enabling AI assistants to interact with enterprise content under strict policy controls.

“With Kiteworks, innovation doesn’t come at the cost of compliance,” says Yaron Galant, chief product officer. “Our clients get intelligent automation, and security teams maintain oversight of every data exchange with comprehensive governance controls and end-to-end audit tracking.”

AI protection, however, is only part of the equation. Consider how most enterprises approach data security today. DSPM, DLP and CASB solutions discover and classify sensitive content across repositories, generating detailed inventories of risk. They’re excellent at pinpointing where sensitive data lives, but when an employee shares a confidential file externally, these tools must hand off enforcement to separate systems through API integrations. Classification happens in one place, control occurs somewhere else. This gap between discovery and enforcement exists precisely when data faces its greatest risk—the moment of external sharing.

The Kiteworks PDN eliminates the gap between knowing where sensitive data lives and controlling where it goes. It inverts the traditional model by owning the data paths. Email, file sharing, SFTP, managed file transfer, data collection—every channel where sensitive content moves beyond organizational boundaries operates within its infrastructure. Classification intelligence is consumed from clients’ existing DSPM and DLP investments, and attribute-based access control enforcement takes place directly and immediately. No handoffs to third-party systems. The policy their security team defines is the policy that governs every transaction.

With Kiteworks, innovation doesn't come at the cost of compliance. Our clients get intelligent automation, and security teams maintain oversight of every data exchange with comprehensive governance controls and end-to-end audit tracking.

This same architectural philosophy drives Kiteworks’ approach to legacy tool consolidation. Most enterprises today own a graveyard of point solutions accumulated over the years; legacy MFT platforms handling batch transfers, separate file-sharing tools for collaboration, standalone email gateways and random SFTP servers scattered across business units like digital tumbleweeds.

Each system carries its own administration overhead, compliance logging, security configurations and vulnerabilities. The complexity itself becomes a risk factor. Misconfigurations slip through, audit trails fragment and security teams play whack-a-mole trying to maintain consistent policy enforcement.

The Kiteworks PDN unifies these capabilities into a single platform with centralized governance. One consolidated audit trail captures every sensitive data exchange across every channel. This is precisely what auditors want to see when assessing CMMC 2.0 readiness or other regulatory frameworks. Compliance reporting gets simpler, security posture gets stronger and IT teams stop babysitting disparate systems. Most importantly, security policies apply uniformly regardless of how data moves.

This approach is extended to data collection through its Advanced Forms capability. Business users can build sophisticated intake workflows without IT involvement. External parties submitting information need no license, removing friction from critical business processes. Every submission automatically generates secure, access-controlled storage with both human-readable PDFs and machine-processable CSV outputs for workflow automation. The process is also governed by the same policies protecting every other data exchange across the PDN.

The Kiteworks PDN represents a simple premise: organizations shouldn’t choose between enabling collaboration and protecting sensitive content. When every data pathway is controlled, that tradeoff disappears.