For enterprises deploying AI agents, security and trust are top-of-mind issues. When given the authority to act autonomously, they can inadvertently leak or expose data, rack up huge token costs, or produce inaccurate or patently false outputs. These risks, says VMware, require a new type of platform that imposes strict controls over what agents can do, while giving them access to the contextually-relevant data they need.
With this in mind, Broadcom has introduced a new secure, AI-ready data foundation in the VMware Tanzu Platform that it says addresses these needs. Announced today at VMware Explore, the offering is intended to help enterprises move beyond pilot purgatory to production-ready agents.
It isn’t a new data platform, or a new feature that customers must deploy, noted Adam Reeves, a research director at IDC. Instead, the VMware team “built the missing plumbing between the data enterprises already have and the agents that need it.”
Built-in agent harnesses, deny-by-default security
Integrated directly into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the updated Tanzu Platform features an “AI-ready” data infrastructure, Purnima Padmanabhan, GM of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division, explained during a briefing. Structured and unstructured data can be processed within a customer’s private cloud, and remain in that environment, and multimodal data ingestion, parsing, and semantic layering give agents context.
