There's a lot of talk about "agent-ready data governance" right now, and the mechanics are well covered on this board: service principals
per agent, Unity Catalog grants, AI Gateway guardrails, MCP tools as securables.
The layer that sits on top of all of it is far less discussed: evidence. Governance is not configuration. Configuration is where it starts.
Governance is the ability to prove, at any point in time, that the controls you configured actually held -
to an auditor, a regulator or an incident response team at 3am. We are a security division that runs AI governance and compliance programs for enterprises and the gap we see most often is not
technical. Teams have Unity Catalog, AI Gateway and the system tables, all the right primitives.
What they lack is a repeatable way to turn those primitives into audit-ready evidence.
Here is the framework we use:
THE FOUR LAYERS OF EVIDENCE-READY GOVERNANCE 1. Assets - the things you govern: catalogs, schemas, tables, vector indexes, models, MCP servers, Genie spaces.
If it is not in inventory, you cannot govern it. 2. Identity and access - who and what can touch those assets: one service principal per agent (or per agent group), groups
and scoped UC grants. The grant model is the control. 3. Runtime controls - what is enforced at execution time: AI Gateway service policies (input and output), endpoint ACLs, row filters,
column masks, and prompt policies per endpoint. 4. Evidence - the proof that layers 1-3 held: system.access.audit (service_name aibiGenie, aibiMCP, aiAgentFramework),
system.access.assistant_events, system.access.column_lineage, query history, and billing for cost anomalies.
Most teams build layers 1-3 and stop. The compliance value lives in layer 4. THE ARTIFACT THAT WINS AUDITS: A CONTROL MAP The single most useful document is a living map with one row per control, linking four elements:
Control, Implementation, Evidence and Cadence (verification).
Useful references to build each column: https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/admin/system-tables/ https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/admin/system-tables/audit-logs https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/ai-gateway/ai-governance https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/ai-gateway/govern-mcp-service THREE OPERATIONAL HABITS
1. Build the query set before an auditor asks. Standardize the system-table queries you run monthly while the schemas are fresh in your
head - not the week before a SOC 2 observation window closes.
2. Diff policy against reality monthly. The risk is not the initial grant model; it is the accumulation of exceptions - temporary grants, new
MCP servers, new tools. A monthly diff of what is registered as a securable versus what is actually being invoked catches drift before it
becomes a finding.
3. Review the control map on the same cadence as your access reviews. If the map is only updated when someone asks for it, it is already
out of date. The good news: everything you need for the evidence layer already exists in the platform.
The discipline is mapping controls to evidence deliberately and keeping the map alive.
That is what turns "agent-ready" into "audit-ready."
I'm curious how others on this board handle the evidence layer today - do you maintain a formal control map or
rely on ad-hoc system-table queries when the auditor asks?
Regards,
Empire Labs - Security Division
www.empirelabs.com.au
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