Summary:
Organizations are embracing AI to bolster their cybersecurity defenses, leading to significant reductions in data breach costs and enhanced threat detection capabilities. AI empowers companies to stay ahead of evolving cyber threats while freeing up IT resources for strategic initiatives, ultimately paving the way for a more secure digital future.
Modern organizations face a never-ending battle against sophisticated and repeated cyber threats and cyberattacks as their attack surfaces continue to expand. That’s why they are turning to AI to boost their defenses and enhance their cybersecurity.
By deploying security AI and automation capabilities, organizations have achieved an average reduction of $3 million in data breach costs. However, companies must have a solid digital infrastructure and modern technology to take advantage of AI-powered cybersecurity solutions.
Here, we share why organizations should consider AI for cybersecurity and how to start evolving legacy tech to protect against future cyberattacks.
How AI transforms an organization’s cybersecurity initiatives
AI does not replace an organization’s cybersecurity program — they use it in conjunction with their existing cybersecurity structure to augment it and add an additional layer of security. The AI continuously learns from new security data and adapts its algorithms to more accurately detect cyber threats and stay a step ahead of constantly shifting cyberattacks.
AI has the unique ability to sift through large amounts of data to detect security threats, such as phishing emails, more accurately and efficiently than a human. The AI identifies patterns in the data used across an organization and uncovers anomalous behavior within these patterns.
For example, the AI observes an organization’s user behavior patterns concerning when and on what devices employees log in. If it detects variances in the time or device type, it alerts the IT team.
However, AI goes beyond just identifying and detecting security threats. Many organizations feel that AI’s main advantage is that it can respond to and protect against cyber threats faster and at a greater scale, resulting in significant cost savings. Insights from IBM show that if an organization takes 230 calendar days to detect, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents, security AI and automation can cut that time by up to 99 days.
Ways AI is being used for cybersecurity
AI has received much hype, and companies are eager to adopt it. Yet many are not accelerating their AI initiatives because they still rely on legacy systems or lack the digital infrastructure to implement AI for cybersecurity.
In a Deloitte study of business leaders, half (50%) said the biggest challenge to improving margins by cutting costs is misalignment between technology infrastructure and new internal business conditions.
Another reason organizations are not immediately adopting AI for cybersecurity is that they do not have employees to implement it. An IBM study found that the top barrier hindering successful AI adoption at enterprises both exploring or deploying AI is limited AI skills and expertise (33%).
These compounding factors are why many organizations turn to managed services providers like Windstream to modernize, transform and optimize their digital infrastructures and enable AI use for cybersecurity. Windstream helps organizations assess, architect, implement and manage their IT environments with end-to-end expert support — laying the foundation for a secure future with AI.
