Blog

Analysis on enterprise AI governance, inline policy enforcement, agentic AI security, and regulatory compliance.

DeepInspect vs Portkey: Where LLM Operational Plumbing Stops and Regulatory Audit Starts

Portkey is a closed-source LLM gateway and observability platform. It normalizes the API surface across 200+ model providers, adds operational features (retries, fallbacks, caching, load balancing, cost tracking), and exposes traces, evaluations, and prompt management on the same control plane. DeepInspect sits at the HTTP request boundary and answers a different question: identity-bound policy on prompt content, per-route data classification, and a per-decision audit record formatted for EU AI Act Article 12 review. This piece walks through what each one does and where the two layers compose.

Comparisons & Alternativesportkeyai-gatewaycomparisoninline-enforcementauditeu-ai-act
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DeepInspect vs MLflow AI Gateway: Where Model Routing Stops and Policy Enforcement Starts

MLflow AI Gateway (formerly MLflow Deployments) is the open-source MLflow component that lets a team register LLM provider endpoints under a single MLflow control surface, then call them from MLflow client code with key rotation and basic routing. DeepInspect sits at the HTTP request boundary and answers a different question: identity-bound policy on prompt content, per-route data classification, and a per-decision audit record formatted for EU AI Act Article 12 review. This piece walks through what each one does and where the two layers compose for regulated AI workloads.

Comparisons & Alternativesmlflow-ai-gatewayai-gatewaycomparisoninline-enforcementauditeu-ai-act
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AI Security for Coding Agents: The Source-Code, Secret, and Action Boundaries the Agent Crosses

Coding agents read source code, write code changes, run shell commands, call external APIs, and commit results back to the repository. The agent crosses multiple action boundaries inside a single workflow with the developer identity at the top and machine credentials at the bottom. This piece walks through the source-code data the agent reads at request time, the secret-handling surface the agent exposes, the action boundaries the inspection layer commits decisions at, and the audit record format the security team and the regulator consume.

Platform & Architecturecoding-agentai-securityidentity-awareaudit-logsinline-enforcementdeveloper-tools
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How to Evaluate AI Security Vendors: The 12 Questions a Production Buyer Asks Before Signing

AI security vendor evaluation produces defensible decisions when the buyer applies a fixed set of architectural and operational questions to every vendor in the matrix. The questions cover the inspection boundary, the audit record format, the policy management surface, the regulatory mapping, the operational behavior under failure, and the procurement and integration mechanics. This piece walks through the twelve questions, the answer pattern that satisfies the regulator and the security team, and the way the matrix gets used inside a procurement cycle that has to close before the EU AI Act August 2 deadline.

Comparisons & Alternativesvendor-evaluationai-securityprocurementcomplianceaudit-logseu-ai-act
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Best AI Guardrails Platform: The Architectural Criteria a Production Buyer Should Use

The "best AI guardrails platform" question collapses without a clear set of architectural criteria. The criteria that hold up under regulator review are inspection boundary, write-path independence, policy versioning, audit field set, integrity stamping, model-agnosticism, and fail-closed behavior. This piece walks through the criteria, the questions a buyer asks of each vendor, and the architectural pattern that satisfies all seven, so the evaluation matrix the buyer uses produces a defensible decision the security team and the audit reviewer accept.

Comparisons & Alternativesai-guardrailsvendor-evaluationai-securityinline-enforcementaudit-logsai-policy-enforcement
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Open Source LLM Guardrails: The Libraries Available, Where They Sit, and What They Cannot Replace

Open source LLM guardrails libraries cover prompt-side and response-side filtering inside the application or inference path. Llama Guard, NeMo Guardrails, Guardrails AI, LMQL, and Rebuff each occupy a different position in the stack and produce different control surfaces. This piece walks through the libraries available, the architectural position each one takes, the controls they produce, and the regulatory profile that requires an external inspection layer on top of any of them.

AI Security Solutionsllm-guardrailsopen-sourcellm-securityai-policy-enforcementinline-enforcementmodel-safety
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LLM Firewall: How the Inspection Layer Differs From a Network Firewall and a Model Guardrails Library

An LLM firewall is the inspection layer that sits inline between the calling identity and the LLM endpoint, evaluating identity-bound policy at the HTTP request boundary and committing a per-decision audit record. The layer differs from a network firewall (which inspects TCP and TLS metadata) and from a model guardrails library (which runs inside the inference path). This piece walks through the inspection target the LLM firewall has, the request-time decisions the layer commits, the deployment topology that fits a production stack, and the audit record the layer produces.

AI Security Solutionsllm-firewallinline-enforcementai-gatewayllm-securityaudit-logsai-policy-enforcement
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AI Firewall: What It Actually Inspects, Where It Sits, and the Audit Record It Produces

The phrase "AI firewall" gets applied to four very different products. The category collapses when you ask what each one inspects, where in the request path the inspection happens, and whether the record series survives EU AI Act Article 12 review. This piece walks through the four product shapes that get marketed as AI firewalls, the architectural property each one has and lacks, the inspection target the term should refer to in a regulated deployment, and the audit record the inspection layer commits at decision time.

AI Security Solutionsai-firewallinline-enforcementai-gatewayllm-securityaudit-logsai-policy-enforcement
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ISO 42001 vs ISO 27001: How the AI Management System Layers on Top of Information Security

ISO 42001 and ISO 27001 share the same management-system structure (the Annex SL Harmonized Structure) and a substantial portion of the Annex A control catalog. Organizations with an ISO 27001 certification have a head start on ISO 42001 because the management-system processes transfer with modifications. The two standards address different risk domains: 27001 covers information security risks to confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets, while 42001 covers AI-specific risks to fairness, reliability under adversarial pressure, transparency, accountability, and the responsible use of AI systems. This piece walks through the structural overlap, the additive AI-specific controls 42001 introduces, the integration pattern for combined audits, and the inspection-layer architecture that produces evidence under both standards.

Compliance & Regulationiso-42001iso-27001aimsismsai-compliancecertification
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ISO 42001 Implementation Guide: How to Stand Up an AI Management System That Passes Certification

ISO/IEC 42001:2023 is the first international management-system standard for AI. The standard takes the ISO management-system structure (the same Annex SL Harmonized Structure used in ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and ISO 14001) and applies it to AI. Certification requires a documented AI management system covering scope, leadership, planning, support, operations, performance evaluation, and improvement. This piece walks through the certification path step by step, the Annex A controls that have to be operational, the audit evidence the certification body expects, the implementation timeline a typical mid-market organization runs, and where the AI-specific controls intersect the inspection-layer architecture.

Compliance & Regulationiso-42001aimsai-management-systemai-compliancecertificationaudit-logs
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PCI DSS and AI: How v4.0 Reaches Production AI Deployments Touching Cardholder Data

PCI DSS v4.0 took full effect on March 31, 2025. The standard reaches AI deployments wherever cardholder data passes through an AI prompt, a tool result, or a retrieval corpus the AI system queries. The applicable requirements include the data flow documentation under Requirement 1, the cardholder data discovery and scope reduction under Requirement 3, the access control restrictions under Requirement 7, the logging obligations under Requirement 10, and the security testing obligations under Requirement 11. This piece walks through the requirements that reach AI deployments, where most implementations fail the QSA review, and the inspection-layer architecture that produces the audit evidence and the scope reduction the assessor will accept.

Compliance & Regulationpci-dsscardholder-dataai-complianceaudit-logsinline-enforcementpayments
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GDPR Article 22 and AI: What Automated Decision-Making Requires of Production Deployments

GDPR Article 22 limits decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal or similarly significant effects on the data subject. AI deployments that produce loan approvals, credit decisions, hiring decisions, fraud-detection outcomes, or insurance underwriting fall inside the scope. The exemption pathways carry their own obligations: explicit consent, contract necessity, or Union or member state authorization. The Article 22(3) right to obtain human intervention and the transparency obligation require records that demonstrate the meaningful intervention happened and that the data subject received meaningful information. This piece walks through the article, the exemption pathways, the meaningful-intervention test, and the inspection-layer architecture that produces the evidence the supervisor will accept.

Compliance & Regulationgdprarticle-22automated-decisionsai-complianceaudit-logsdata-protection
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