The Role of AI And Cybersecurity
By Matt Brennan
AI and cybersecurity go hand in hand. As companies continue to expand, they require more hardware and software. Combine that with emerging work from home and bring your own device type policies, and traditional methods of cybersecurity may no longer accomplish the job.
Growing companies have an ever-growing number of vulnerable attack points. Analyzing and protecting these points is no longer a job that can be accomplished on a human scale. This is where artificial intelligence can help. AI can do anything from pinpoint attempts to hack into your server, to identifying behavior that may leave data increasingly exposed.
What It Means to Have AI In the Fight
You may have advanced technology software that protects your company’s data, but that doesn’t necessarily make it AI. The main difference is this: AI becomes more intelligent with more data. It becomes more efficient, or smarter at the job.
Alternatively, many cybersecurity programs may simply employ data analytics. With data analytics, you are collecting data points to make the next logical conclusion, but there is no cognitive ability on the part of the program.
AI Improves Cybersecurity by Employing New Knowledge
AI and cybersecurity both improve when the technology can employ its new knowledge to protect company data. This is done through machine learning, neural networks, or deep learning.
It becomes an ideal tool for solving cybersecurity issues when tasks like threat detection become automated. A medium-sized company may have hundreds of devices and only a handful of skilled cybersecurity professionals on staff. There may be more data stored than any one person can analyze or protect.
When the scale of data and information passed around is beyond what any one person can protect, AI becomes a dependable option for asset protection. Once AI is properly trained, it becomes an extension of your cybersecurity team.
What AI and Cybersecurity Can Accomplish
Below are just a few of the tasks that a properly trained AI can handle in order to help with cybersecurity:
- Asset inventory – This includes getting a scope on the number of company devices and data volume surrounding a company.
- Threat risk – AI can establish patterns in hacker behavior and company exposure to determine the level of risk that your company is currently under.
- Improved Response – Without AI, it may take days, weeks, or months to even realize that data has been breached. AI can help with an immediate response.
The bottom line is that attacks are becoming more advanced as well. The best tools available to protect your data are also being used to coordinate the attack in the first place. The ability for AI to detect and help protect companies against evolving threats provides a distinct advantage in cybersecurity.
AI and cybersecurity will continue to grow together. An AI and human partnership in protecting company data will be a powerful combination that allows companies to concentrate on their core strengths for years to come. It’s the best way to detect threats, coordinate responses, and protect valuable company data in a world that contains ever-evolving threats.
