Streamlining your cybersecurity with autonomous decision-making2 min read

With the myriad of threats present in a typical digital ecosystem, the priority in a strong cybersecurity strategy should be to manage common risks and mitigate their potentially disastrous consequences. Ideally, a management plan will account for these familiar risks, regularly patching vulnerabilities, allowing an organisation’s cybersecurity team to focus on larger and more aggressive threats. But no security team can be tracking every single risk that appears – not without some help, that is.

Systems that use some kind of autonomous system have been around for a number of years, streamlining security decisions by automatically deploying measures determined by an organisation’s cyber and compliance strategy. However, as Artificial Intelligence technology begins to be applied to cybersecurity in earnest, there is a chance that AI-powered tools will revolutionise cyber strategies.

AI has been enhanced by the ever-growing number of datasets and affordable and reliable networking and storage provided by cloud computing, making it easily suitable for autonomous decision-making. Today’s AI makes pattern-based decisions, building upon past knowledge and recent data patterns to steer the course.

Ideally, AI-powered autonomous cybersecurity will take the current repetitive, manual work of security teams, such as patching and configuring networks. The security teams will then be free to focus on cyber strategy and other complex concerns. Additionally, this would hopefully lower the rate of human error that occasionally contributes to breaches and hacks.

With these concerns regulated by the AI, cybersecurity on a larger scale also becomes more possible, as opposed to a near-impossible task. As IoT devices proliferate and interconnect, AI-powered cybersecurity will allow for decisions to be made and implemented across a network of devices.

Finally, a shift to AI-powered autonomous systems will shift the focus from purely reactive cybersecurity – which can never be fully effective – to proactive, strategic cybersecurity.

As technology and threats develop, it is important to continually update cybersecurity strategies, looking to innovative solutions to manage these problems. Using AI for cybersecurity is a clear step in the right direction, streamlining manual processes and presenting crucial information for effective security.