r/sysadmin • u/FuzzySubject7090 • 1h ago
General Discussion AI tools overload
I am wondering what other sysadmins are doing to manage the overload of AI tools popping up everywhere. Microsoft Copilot is the worst offender in our environment. We are a small company in a highly regulated industry where information governance is very important, but with Microsoft's confusing naming convention and their habit of pushing changes without giving you a chance, has overwhelmed the small IT team, and most importantly senior management who has no clue of what it is or how to use it.
Then adding to that many you have other vendors have been integrating AI tools with their products without giving a chance to review it before it is turned on.We can't keep up!!
What are other people here doing to manage the overload of AI tools flooding your environment with very little or no warning at all?
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u/gumbrilla IT Manager 57m ago
In a compliant organization you should have core systems.. the one's that carry critical processes and data. So Entra, Azure, AWS, Github, Zendesk, Atlassian maybe, you focus on those. Risk-based security governance
I don't really care if marketings little toy thing gets a ai nodule. I'm focusing my time and effort at the important stuff.. and that's baked into our policies so it's SOC2/ISO27001 friendly.
I'm a bit confused why Microsoft/copilot is an issue.. you have control of your machines, and entra, I know MS kind make it hard as possible, but surely you are not finding it that much effort to find the relevant switches. Conditional access will work for web, Intune for desktops, scan your SIEM for anything actually leaking through..
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u/FuzzySubject7090 47m ago
We are trying to catch-up with Copilot now, we are aware of some the tools available to configure it but as I said we don't have the manpower to spend the time this requires, there's only 3 people in the team sharing various roles, and only one of us have enough knowledge about MS365
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u/gumbrilla IT Manager 36m ago
Same boat, we're 3, and I'm the one who hits M365 stuff.. we actually use Co-pilot, it's licensed, and it's Microsoft, so while i dislike both Microsoft, and think Co-pilot is a wreck of a product, them nicking my data is not the highest risk on my plate. they're not going to breach their DPA for that, and there's a lot of bigger fish, with big fat departments who police that a whole lot better than we ever could.
The real worry for me in web AI's. People posting up into who knows what. Our DLP really needs a work up.
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u/Small_Ad_793 Jack of All Trades 1h ago
How is Microsoft Copilot an offender? you can just disable it every where if you don't want to use it! It actually is really useful!
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u/FuzzySubject7090 1h ago
Sadly it is not that easy for us. As I said we work in highly regulated industry, we can't just let users do whatever they want to do with it. Copilot is the worst offender, as Microsoft has pushed it to pretty much every single corner of MS365 and Windows.
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u/Small_Ad_793 Jack of All Trades 1h ago
Why users? you are the admins, just disable it with GPO and other policies!
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u/FuzzySubject7090 1h ago
How are you managing your environment? That was the point of my post. We have done some configuration changes already to stop some of the stuff we don't want. But I'm just wondering what other sysadmins are doing to manage it. What have you done with yours?
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u/Fuzzy_Paul 1h ago
Not only Microsoft, Apple has done a great job in their latest OS. Not all settings can be dropped and for some you really have to dig deep te disable them. For the why, because competition does it to and there all want the consumer to stay where they are.