3 reasons to consider adopting AI cybersecurity tools

Cybersecurity threats are growing at a breakneck pace. However, the reluctance to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into people-based processes hampers organizations and their cybersecurity, especially as bad actors weaponize AI in cyberattacks.

AI produces insights derived from large amounts of data, enabling organizations to make real-time decisions that cannot be made with human effort alone. As a result, AI improves organizations’ ability to prevent and mitigate cyberattacks before people can detect them.

While not a magic bullet, AI plays an instrumental role in detecting, preventing, and responding to cyberattacks when paired with cybersecurity best practices — and it enables insight. faster and more accurate security decision. Don’t let fear of new technologies keep your organization from harnessing the benefits of AI in cybersecurity.

The advantages of AI cybersecurity far outweigh the disadvantages

Many organizations may be reluctant to embrace AI and automation, which is understandable but wrong. AI can prevent and minimize security vulnerabilities, help ensure compliance, and ensure software security. Like any tool, there are challenges associated with new AI implementations. But once these challenges are better understood, they are easier to accept.

For example, the most effective AI requires huge data sets to learn and improve decision-making, which can make it expensive to implement. However, the savings associated with improved efficiency and automation can offset the initial cost. Careful monitoring of AI results can mitigate many other potential risks, such as introducing unintended human bias into AI models.

Despite these challenges, which can be mitigated, the application of AI to cybersecurity remains essential. That’s why your organization needs to be aware of the potential pitfalls, but also know that the pros far outweigh the cons. To mitigate ongoing cyber attacks and better protect your environment, your business needs good cyber hygiene combined with AI.

3 Ways AI Can Improve Your Cybersecurity Posture

Some organizations use AI to detect attacks but are hesitant to use it as a preventive or reactive strategy. However, now is not the time to hesitate. With cyberattacks on the rise and global events spawning new cyberthreats every day, AI and automation are key to unlocking agility, greater operational efficiency, and faster response time for your organization.

Here are some ways to reduce human error and improve your cybersecurity posture with AI.

1. Automate repetitive tasks

Cybersecurity and IT teams are focused on day-to-day efforts, which challenges them to constantly monitor threats. When used in combination with other automation tools, AI threat monitoring can reduce the workload of human employees and free up resources to focus on higher priority tasks. Automation can block suspicious traffic based on set criteria or encrypt and quarantine certain file types, while machine learning algorithms can make more complex decisions on your behalf with full visibility.

2. Identify potential vulnerabilities

AI use cases include continuous monitoring, behavioral analysis, malware protection, malicious bot protection, and attack surface analysis – all essential capabilities in the fight against cyberattacks.

For example, attack surface analysis is the analysis of systems and processes to discover weaknesses. This allows your business to scan the entire attack surface in the same way as an attacker. With this approach, you can proactively identify vulnerabilities and determine what would happen if that vulnerability were exploited, for example, potential risk of data exposure or opportunities for malicious code execution. This information allows you to fix vulnerabilities and better protect your environment.

3. Optimize cybersecurity best practices

To get the most out of your AI application, you need to practice regular cyber hygiene. Best practices such as identity and access management, vulnerability management, secure coding, cyber threat hunting, and ongoing user education can help ensure that your organization’s cybersecurity posture remains strong.

AI isn’t the ultimate solution to cybersecurity, but it does enable security teams to be more efficient. And while AI is yet to be monitored, its benefits and ability to drive innovation, accuracy, and speed are key to detecting and mitigating cyber threats.

AI is an essential resource in a long line of defense

The biggest hurdle for many organizations in their cybersecurity efforts is the fear of implementing AI. But this fear and reluctance is easier to overcome once companies understand the positive attributes that AI has to offer.

AI is not a substitute for good security hygiene. Instead, think of it as an arrow in the cybersecurity quiver – another essential resource in a long line of cyber defense. When augmented with cybersecurity best practices, AI can make a significant contribution to reducing security vulnerabilities and responding to threats.

Caleb Merriman is CISO at Deltek.