Is Your Virtual Agent Enterprise Ready?

To build an enterprise-grade chatbot, you need an enterprise-grade platform. So what should you look for in a platform?

Everyone needs a platform that is easy to build on, which is reliable and will get them to market with their chatbot fast. But larger organizations whose virtual assistants will become a critical part of their customer care, that will handle sensitive data, that will grow exponentially over time have very specific security and scalability needs.

This post will detail some of the things you should look for in an enterprise-grade platform and how Watson Assistant meets those needs.

Data Isolation

If your organization’s compliance and security requirements call for running on a single-tenant virtual environment, opt for full data isolation. With a Watson Assistant premium plan, your application does not share its environment with any other application.

Ownership and Privacy

Maintain control and ownership of your data. With Watson Assistant, you own your data and insights. And if you want to go even further, on a premium plan, you can even opt-out of the built-on conversation logging. You would lose some of the analytics and improvement functionality, but with Watson Assistant, you have a choice.

Bring Your Own Keys

Data encryption is a must. But some organizations may want a higher level of control with their own key. Watson Assistant client data is of course always encrypted, but premium clients can integrate Key Protect or Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) for a higher level of control. With Key Protect you can create, import, and manage encryption keys. You can assign access policies to the keys, assign users or service IDs to the keys, or give the key access only to a specific Watson service. Available on new premium Watson Assistant slots at the time of provisioning.

Network Isolation

Make sure your data is encrypted at rest and in motion. IBM employs the latest technically feasible cryptography technologies to protect customer data. Client data is encrypted using AES-256 bit encryption.

Private Endpoints

Need greater data isolation and security? You can prevent your data from being transferred over the public internet with IBM Service Endpoints. Watson Assistant private network endpoint provides a unique IP address that is accessible to you without a VPN connection. Available on Watson Assistant premium plans.

Mutual Authentication

When sensitive data is at stake, make sure communication is secure. With a Watson Assistant premium plan you can establish an even more secure channel of communication between your app and Watson Assistant through mutually authenticated SSL certificates.

Access Control & Audit Trails

Managing who can see and edit your virtual assistant’s components is critical to protecting your development and production environments. Watson Assistant offers a finer level of access control. You can choose who in your organization can view and who can edit your skills and assistants. Permissions are granted for the entire instance or for each individual skill and assistant. Coupled with dialog skill versioning, access control provides an easy way of protecting your development, testing and production environments.

There are times when you may need to know the who, what and when of changes made to your assistant. Perhaps unexpected results have you scratching your head and you want to know what happened. Watson Assistant premium clients can use Activity Tracker with LogDNA to see what updates were made to skills and assistants. Activity Tracker offers a UI as well as an option to export logs. You can also be alerted about critical actions as they happen.

Give it a try by provisioning an instance of Activity Tracker in the same Resource Group as your Watson Assistant instance.

Industry Certifications and Compliance

As a security officer, auditor, or manager you may need to ensure your virtual assistant meets certain industry certifications. Watson services have these industry certifications:

ISO27001
ISO27017
ISO27018
GDPR
HIPAA ready (Premium US East instances)
FISMA ready (IBM Cloud Pak for Data offering)
SOC2 (later this year)

The compliance of Watson Services is maintained though regular reviews by both IBM internal and third-party auditors. Watson AI services continue to rapidly evolve to support other types of regulated workloads.

On-Premise Solution

Whether for regulatory or technical reasons, some organizations require an on-premise solution. Watson Assistant is available on IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data. Built on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is deployable in just hours and runs on-premise or on your private cloud. It also fully supports multi-cloud environments such as IBM Cloud™, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud.

Scalability

Now that you know what makes for an enterprise-grade virtual assistant platform, scale across your business with a trusted, secure partner. Watson Assistant is built on the IBM Cloud — ready to scale with you.

Contact us to learn more about Watson Assistant premium and on-premise offerings.

Oscar Kafati is an AI and machine learning product manager at IBM and has been developing Watson AI products since 2014.