The AI Data Layer: What Agents Read, What the Network Carries, and What Governance Can No Longer See
Enterprises spent two decades building a data stack for humans and reports. Agentic AI is now reading, querying, writing, and recombining that data at machine speed – and the new data layer that feeds it looks nothing like the one that came before. Vector databases, RAG pipelines, embedding stores, and persistent agent memory have become the live substrate of the business. This panel convenes data, security, and network leaders rebuilding the data layer for agentic load: what the stack actually looks like in production, how agentic RAG is reshaping retrieval patterns, the network impact most teams did not see coming (east-west traffic explosion, cross-region sovereignty crossings, new egress cost curves), and the governance gap traditional DLP and DSPM tools are not closing (vector stores outside classification, prompt-assembled contexts that leak across trust boundaries, shadow RAG pipelines built outside sanctioned platforms).
Ashwin Ambekar is a security and technology leader with over 28 years of experience designing and securing large-scale infrastructure, platforms, and distributed systems. At eBay, he focuses on cloud and AI security, with experience spanning compute and network security, cryptography, identity and access management, Zero Trust, confidential computing, data security, and privacy and regulatory frameworks including GDPR and PCI.
His current work extends these disciplines into Agentic AI, focusing on how enterprises can securely deploy and govern autonomous agents. This includes Agentic IAM and delegated authorization, agent sandboxing and workload isolation, securing agent-to-agent and agent-to-service interactions, protecting sensitive data, and establishing visibility and governance over what agents can access, what actions they can perform, and how data moves across enterprise trust boundaries.
Jon Duren is an accomplished technology professional with over 25 years of experience in service-provider, data center, cloud and AI solutions. He is driven by a passion for applying technical solutions to achieve business outcomes and is currently working to expand the WWT AI Solutions practice.
Jon actively seeks out the best strategies to create customer value. He is constantly monitoring marketing trends, innovative and disruptive technologies, and significant market transitions to identify opportunities for driving customer growth and success. With a talent for breaking down complex topics into easy-to-understand concepts, Jon is able to develop and share a vision of where business and technology intersect to create better outcomes.
Baird has 30+ years in enterprise cybersecurity, most recently Principal Cybersecurity Architect (Identity, GenAI & Cloud) at Cigna, where I was the cybersecurity representative for the AI Center of Excellence. Since then I have been doing independent research — hands-on agentic builds, RAG pipelines, agent memory, and the governance gaps traditional tools miss, which is right in this panel territory.
Derek is the Head of Security at Together.ai and the former Head of Infrastructure Security at Cloudflare. He has over 20 years of experience in designing security frameworks at scale. His main focus is on research and development within the fields of AI, encryption, and infrastructure security.
He earned a masters in cybersecurity from Purdue University and now owns more than 60 global patents related to cryptography, key management, and distributed ledger technology.
Dr. D. Brian Letort is a seasoned leader at the intersection of artificial intelligence, data strategy and enterprise architecture. Currently serving as Head of the Corporate Data Office & Platform AI and Chief Architect at Digital Realty (since September 2022), he has more than 25 years of experience in IT, data science, software engineering and cloud-driven architecture.
