When Omnissa rolled out a new AI governance authority product called Elara in beta this week, the vendor framed it as a way to gain visibility across the enterprise data silos that typically divide modern companies—whether those silos run along lines of business, span disparate geographies, or sit inside separate operational units.
Omnissa, formerly a unit of VMware, said in its announcement that Elara connects signals across systems that often operate independently. This gives IT and security leaders greater context into how digital work tools, including AI apps, models, and agents, are being used across their environment—and the ability to apply policies and controls based on broader business context.
The key differentiator, according to the company, is that Elara is designed to sit above existing tools rather than replace them. Many current products are limited to authorizing actions within the specific systems they manage. Elara instead connects the systems customers already run, offering broader context without requiring organizations to standardize on a single technology stack.
A hypothetical that captures the ambition
Brian Link, product CTO for Elara, offered a hypothetical scenario to illustrate what cross-silo data sharing could achieve—an enterprise CIO’s data Holy Grail for decades.
Imagine a cybersecurity team needs to push an urgent OS update to global retail tablets to close a newly discovered vulnerability. In theory, Elara could consult multiple data sources across the organization to properly evaluate the risks and advise whether the update should happen right now.
Link described a scenario where the stores are in an active change freeze due to an inventory count, and the same iPads are running the inventory application. Elara pulls that freeze from ServiceNow, so the approver sees it before deciding. The decision stops being only a security call and becomes a business trade-off.
Before anyone approves, Link said, Elara shows the blast radius: the devices, users, and services the change would touch, plus the events the approval would trigger. Only then does the human decide.
Analyst: the obstacle is politics, not technology
Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research, agreed that cutting through the data visibility limits caused by enterprise data silos has tremendous potential. But he stressed the logistical challenges, given how tightly many lines-of-business executives limit access to their unit’s information.
“A security patch colliding with an inventory freeze is not a technology problem. It is a business trade-off,” Dickson said. “The example is strong, and the corporate politics raised may be its Achilles’ heel.”
Dickson pointed out that Omnissa’s natural territory is the endpoint, which is one silo. Security, network, legal, and finance teams have no particular reason to treat it as the referee.
He also noted that this scenario only works if the information happens to appear in the very limited number of places where Omnissa can access data. It doesn’t break down data silos so much as it enjoys tiny cracks of visibility between some of them.
What this means for enterprise data silos
For IT and security leaders, the Elara beta highlights a tension that has long plagued enterprise architecture: the value of cross-system context versus the reality of who actually controls the data.
Dickson warned that Elara does not just watch—it can block or limit actions, so the ask is bigger than read access. A single control point across every silo is also a single point of failure, “the keys to the kingdom.” A CISO would be right to scrutinize it hard.
Link acknowledged the dependency, saying the team is “reliant on people [in IT] bringing those pieces of the puzzle to us.” His team is trying to address the question of what to do “when that context no longer lives inside a person’s head,” adding, “Right now, I don’t see anyone else trying to do that.”
Because Elara is still in beta and the examples are hypothetical rather than customer results, organizations should treat the product as a promising direction rather than a finished solution. The data silo conversation it renews may be the most valuable outcome so far.
Source: Computerworld
Over to you: Do you think an AI governance layer like Elara can overcome the corporate politics that keep enterprise data trapped in silos?
