If 2022 was a milestone year for the acceptance and adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), 2023 promises wider implementation and exciting growth opportunities to innovate. Organisations are using AI to extend insights and choices for human decision-makers and reduce the working capital required to run a business. According to a McKinsey report, both AI adoption and AI capabilities in organisations have doubled since 2017. Budget allocations for AI as part of a digital transformation strategy have grown from 5% in 2018 to 52% in 2022. AI’s impact will only increase in the coming years, with IDC projecting the AI market in India to grow at a CAGR of 20.2 per cent to reach $ 7.8 billion by 2025.

One key area where AI will have a significant impact will be cybersecurity. Security operations teams, which have traditionally depended on resource-intensive analysis, are now dealing with an increased frequency and complexity of vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks. As a result, they are finding it very challenging to bring the accuracy of insights, timeliness, rapidity, and responsiveness that is crucial to threat mitigation.

The role of AI in Cybersecurity

Given the growing sophistication and the sheer number of threat variants, conventional methods no longer suffice. According to a report by IBM in 2022, the average total cost of a data breach in India hit a whopping INR 176 million – which was about 25% higher than in 2020. Hence, it is evident that businesses cannot evade cyberattacks. Therefore, keeping security capabilities flexible enough to match attacker agility will be the biggest challenge as the industry moves forward.

AI can help address significant gaps in existing conventional security systems by bringing in improved insights, greater productivity, and economies of scale. The ability of AI to learn continuously and build its understanding of the threat surface comes in handy when combined with automation, as it rapidly accesses and assimilates data artefacts by the billions. AI can help by weeding through high volumes of raw data to proactively highlight important alerts, auto-correlate related events, and recommend the next best actions to remediate. It also helps deliver speed and accuracy to an analytics engine and creates new operational models that perform at scale in distributed and complex environments. AI helps analysts apply their valuable skills to the most challenging problems by reducing false positives and automating low-value repetitive tasks.

For instance, when Cargills bank decided to augment its defence capabilities against sophisticated threats using better monitoring and preventive protocols, it adopted an AI-based security portfolio driven by a pre-emptive approach to threats and risk mitigation. This helped analysts investigate potential threats by leveraging natural language processing capabilities across security blogs, websites, research papers and other sources to help shorten cyber security investigations from weeks or days to minutes or hours. It also allowed the bank to comply with key policies and implement procedures relating to risk, information security, and technology.

The road to cybersecurity in 2023

Leaders across the world agree that cybersecurity is a key concern that requires global attention and response. In the Global Cybersecurity Outlook report by WEF, 91% of respondents cited the probability of a cyber-event with a catastrophic outcome within two years. Therefore, organisations are increasingly opting for a risk-based approach to information security in 2023. 

For every organisation, the strategy is to put security everywhere so that they can thrive in the evolving landscape. There should be an integrated portfolio of security products and services infused with AI and a modern approach using zero-trust principles that will help clients succeed. With the rise in cyber-attacks, exposure points have been exponential growth. Therefore organisations must shift their reactive “Find and Fix” focus to include a more holistic and proactive threat-driven defence strategy that gives attacker’s view of both known and unknown risks and can help organisations adopt preventive measures before incidents happen. Organisations are looking to improve accuracy and response time with AI and Automation through the approach of predicting, preventing, and responding to modern threats is the way forward.

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