Datadog unveils AI-powered security tools for cloud & code

Datadog has introduced a suite of artificial intelligence security tools designed to detect and mitigate risks across cloud and AI environments.

New AI agent

The company has launched Bits AI Security Analyst, an AI agent that autonomously investigates potential threats and supports teams in managing risks with greater efficiency and accuracy. Integrated into Datadog Cloud SIEM, this agent triages security signals—starting with those generated by AWS CloudTrail—and performs detailed investigations into possible threats. Actionable, context-driven recommendations are then provided to help security teams respond more swiftly.

"AI has exponentially increased the ever-expanding backlog of security risks and vulnerabilities organizations deal with. This is because AI-native apps are not deterministic; they're more of a black box and have an increased surface area that leaves them open to vulnerabilities like prompt or code injection," said Prashant Prahlad, Vice President of Products, Security at Datadog.

"The latest additions to Datadog's Security Platform provide preventative and responsive measures—powered by continuous runtime visibility—to strengthen the security posture of AI workloads, from development to production."

Enhancing code security

Datadog Code Security, now generally available, aims to help developers and security teams detect and prioritise vulnerabilities not just in proprietary code but also within open-source libraries. The platform is specifically designed to uncover issues that may be present in large language model (LLM) integrations and AI-powered code, as these can be difficult to identify using traditional static analysis tools. The solution also uses artificial intelligence to facilitate the remediation of complex problems and ranks risks based on runtime activity and business impact.

Deep integrations with widely-used developer environments, including integrated development environments (IDEs) and GitHub, are intended to allow faster remediation workflows without interrupting established development processes.

Strengthening AI application security

With AI-native applications operating autonomously and often in unpredictable ways, new types of attacks such as prompt injection have become more prevalent. Datadog's updated security offerings include features to help organisations implement stronger security controls through measures such as separation of privileges, finely-tuned authorisation, and data classification throughout their AI application landscape and infrastructure.

Datadog LLM Observability, now also generally available, monitors the integrity of AI models, with tools to identify harmful or toxic behaviours across prompts and responses in enterprise AI applications. Other updates to Datadog Cloud Security support compliance with standards such as the NIST AI framework. This suite can uncover and remediate misconfigurations, unpatched vulnerabilities, and instances of unauthorised data or infrastructure access. The Sensitive Data Scanner, now supporting AWS S3 and RDS instances in preview, helps prevent personal or sensitive information from inadvertently being incorporated in LLM training data or inference processes.

Monitoring runtime risks

The complexity of AI-based applications increases the challenge for security analysts to manage alerts, distinguish credible threats from benign signals, and respond in a timely manner. According to Datadog, AI applications are at particular risk of attacks that could lead to resource exhaustion or financial damage if not detected early.

Bits AI Security Analyst is designed to reduce the workload on Security Operations Centres by providing initial investigations and filtering for more relevant threats. The new solution aims to enable teams to act on rich context and prioritised guidance so they can focus resources where they matter most.

Additional updates include Datadog Workload Protection, which now features LLM Isolation capabilities in preview. This enables continuous monitoring of interactions between LLMs and their host environments, helping to detect and prevent exploitation of vulnerabilities while enforcing controls to protect production AI models.

Datadog's new security features encompass Code Security, updated Cloud Security tools, Sensitive Data Scanner, Cloud SIEM, Workload and Application Protection, and expanded abilities within LLM Observability. These updates are designed to give organisations multiple layers of risk mitigation as they increasingly deploy AI in critical workflows.