AWS’s Matt Girdharry and Varonis’ Matt Radolec on Data Security, Machine-Speed Risk

Tom Field (SecurityEditor) •
August 7, 2026    

Matt Girdharry, worldwide lead, observability and security, AWS Partnerships, AWS; and Matt Radolec, field CTO, Varonis

Agentic artificial intelligence gives autonomous systems access to data, APIs, networks and cloud services while enabling them to act at machine speed. That combination can sharply expand enterprise risk and the potential blast radius, said AWS’ Matt Girdharry and Varonis’ Matt Radolec.

See Also: Why Healthcare Leaders Are Rethinking Their Data Strategy Before Scaling AI

Enterprises often underestimate what agents can access and how quickly accidents could expose sensitive or regulated data. “Way too many AI agents can get way too much information,” said Radolec, field CTO at Varonis. “AI is simply going to take advantage of that, and lack that conscience to say, ‘Well, I probably shouldn’t access HR data to service this request because I don’t work in HR.””

“You need to secure the model environment, but you also need to start looking more heavily at the data, at the network, at the API security layers and IAM best policies, in order to kind of secure [autonomous systems] more functionally,” said Girdharry, worldwide lead of observability and security for AWS Partnerships at AWS.

In this video interview with ISMG at Black Hat USA 2026, Girdharry and Radolec also discussed:

How least privilege and runtime guardrails can reduce the blast radius of AI agents;
Lessons on sandbox security and runtime observability from the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident;
How AWS and Varonis are helping customers build security and governance into AI projects.

Girdharry leads the AMER Security Technology Partnerships team at AWS. Since joining AWS in 2018, he has held a series of worldwide leadership roles spanning DevSecOps, DevOps and application security, including global lead for DevOps and AppSec at AWS Marketplace.

At Varonis, Radolec advises organizations on cybersecurity strategy. He previously led Varonis’ global team of security and cloud experts that helped organizations thwart cyberattacks initiated by notorious attack groups including Scattered Spider, BlackCat and DarkSide.