If 2022 served as a turning point for the acceptance and application of artificial intelligence (AI), 2023 looks to expand its use and present exciting new chances for innovation. AI is being used by organizations to expand the knowledge and options available to human decision-makers and lower the amount of working capital needed to operate a corporation. In organizations, both AI usage and AI capabilities have increased since 2017, according to a McKinsey analysis. Budget allocations for AI have increased from 5% in 2018 to 52% in 2022 as part of a digital transformation agenda. The influence of AI will only grow over the next few years, according to IDC, which expects the market in India to grow at a CAGR of 20.2% and reach $7.8 billion by 2025.
Cybersecurity is a crucial area where AI will have a big impact. Teams in charge of security operations, which historically relied on resource-intensive analysis, now have to cope with a greater variety and frequency of threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks. They are therefore having a very difficult time bringing the insight precision, timeliness, speed, and responsiveness that is essential to threat mitigation.
AI’s place in cybersecurity
Conventional procedures are no longer enough due to the danger’s increasing sophistication and sheer number of threat types. An IBM study found that in 2022, the average total cost of a data breach in India was staggering INR 176 million, up roughly 25% from the previous year. It follows that companies cannot avoid cyberattacks. Hence, the largest problem for the business going ahead is maintaining security capabilities that are adaptable enough to match adversary agility.
By bringing in better insights, increased productivity, and economies of scale, AI can assist close important holes in current traditional security systems. Automation helps AI learn continually and increase its awareness of the threat surface since it quickly retrieves and assimilates data artefacts by the billions. AI can assist by sorting through large amounts of unstructured data to proactively highlight crucial alarms, automatically correlate related events, and suggest the best course of remedial action. Additionally, it develops new operational models that operate at scale in distributed and complicated situations and aids in delivering speed and accuracy to an analytics engine. AI reduces false positives and automates low-value repetitive operations, allowing analysts to focus on the most difficult challenges.
For instance, Cargills Bank implemented an AI-based security portfolio powered by a pre-emptive approach to risks and risk reduction when it sought to enhance its defense capabilities against complex threats utilizing better monitoring and preventive processes. By utilizing natural language processing tools across security blogs, websites, research papers, and other sources, analysts were able to explore potential vulnerabilities faster—from weeks or days to minutes or hours. Also, it made it possible for the bank to carry out crucial policies and processes in relation to risk, information security, and technology.
Cybersecurity progress in 2023
Global leaders concur that cybersecurity is a major issue that calls for attention and action on a large scale. 91% of respondents to the WEF’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook survey assessed the likelihood that a cyber-event with a catastrophic effect would occur within the next two years. As a result, in 2023, organizations will increasingly choose a risk-based strategy to information security.
For any organization to succeed in the changing environment, security must be implemented everywhere. A modern strategy based on zero-trust principles should be used, together with an integrated portfolio of security goods and services. This will help clients succeed. Exposure points have grown exponentially as a result of the increase in cyberattacks. Therefore, organizations must change their reactive “Find and Fix” strategy to one that includes a more comprehensive and proactive threat-driven defense strategy. This strategy can help organizations adopt preventive measures before incidents happen by giving attackers a view of both known and unknown risks. The way forward is to foresee, avoid, and respond to contemporary risks, which is how organizations are attempting to increase accuracy and response time with AI and automation.
