Enterprise governance is what turns individual security controls into a program an auditor can actually sign off on. Herbie.AI’s identity and encryption controls covered elsewhere on this blog are only half the picture. Enterprise governance adds data classification, secrets management, secure development practices, and incident response on top.
This guide covers the enterprise governance layer: how data gets classified, how LLM usage is governed, and how the organization responds when something goes wrong.
Data Classification: The Foundation of Enterprise Governance
Enterprise governance starts with knowing what you are protecting. Herbie.AI classifies data into four levels, each with its own handling rules.
| Classification | Examples | Handling |
|---|---|---|
| Public | Marketing materials | No restrictions |
| Internal | Internal policies | Employee access only |
| Confidential | Financial data, contracts | Restricted access, encryption |
| Restricted | PII, health records, payment data | Strict access control, full audit trail |
Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)
Beyond the role-based access control covered in Herbie.AI’s security architecture, enterprise governance adds attribute-based access control, where a decision also weighs attributes like department, data classification, time of day and request location — so a Finance employee requesting a Confidential document during business hours from a corporate device is treated differently than the same request at 2 a.m. from an unrecognized location.
Governing What Goes Into the LLM
Enterprise governance also covers how Herbie.AI’s underlying language models are used in practice: restricting which data classifications can be sent to the model, filtering responses before they reach a user, logging every prompt and response for audit, and reviewing model outputs periodically for drift or policy violations. This is the governance layer sitting on top of the agentic AI and AI-RAG capabilities described elsewhere on this blog.
Secrets Management
Credentials, API keys and certificates are stored in a dedicated secrets manager rather than configuration files, with automatic rotation, strict access logging and immediate revocation when a credential is suspected of compromise — a governance discipline that extends the connector-level authentication covered in the enterprise integrations guide.
Secure Development Lifecycle
Enterprise governance extends into how Herbie.AI itself is built: security requirements defined at design time, static code analysis, dependency vulnerability scanning, and a review gate before anything reaches production, so security is a property of the development process and not an afterthought.
Vulnerability Management
Discovered vulnerabilities are triaged by severity and tracked to resolution on a defined timeline, with regular penetration testing feeding back into the same vulnerability management process — the enterprise governance equivalent of the audit logging already covered for runtime security.
Incident Response
When something does go wrong, enterprise governance defines the response in advance rather than improvising: detect, contain, eradicate, recover, and conduct a post-incident review, with a clear communication plan for affected customers and regulators where required.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Enterprise governance also covers what happens if the platform itself goes down — documented recovery time and recovery point objectives, regularly tested failover procedures, and a communication plan, so a disaster recovery event is a rehearsed process rather than an improvised one.
Why Enterprise Governance Matters
Together, data classification, ABAC, secrets management, secure development and incident response are what let an enterprise buyer’s security and compliance teams actually approve Herbie.AI for production use, on top of the frameworks — ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA — already covered in the platform’s security architecture.