AI In Networking & Security Operations

The world of networking and security is developing rapidly, with the rise of AI changing how we approach network operations. There are many benefits to using AI in networking and security, including scalability and efficiency gains. However, there are some challenges that must still be overcome before AI continues to take over many organisational operations.

AI's responsibility in networking

Already, AI is becoming more and more crucial in managing the complexities of expanding IT networks. By comparing irregularities with both past and factual data, AI makes it possible to identify and isolate issues fast. This gives network managers the opportunity to identify the underlying cause of an issue before it becomes a hazard.

Different data-mining techniques can be used in?root cause analysis to swiftly identify the network establishment?responsible for a problem or to make the network itself less vulnerable. AI also has the power to provide IT professionals more time to work on projects like creating new services or enhancing security for current assets.

AI can also help IT teams predict future issues and prepare for them. For example, if a network administrator notices that CPU utilisation is at 100% across all servers, they may be able to use AI to find the cause of this problem. Once the root cause is identified, AI can predict the next time it will occur and create an action plan for how to prevent it from happening again.

Automate Threat Detection and Response

With AI, you can automate your threat detection and response process. Machine learning algorithms can identify threats by identifying patterns in network traffic or behaviour on endpoints. Then they can automatically respond to the threat in real time, before it has a chance to disrupt your business. This is especially critical for organisations with limited resources who want to make sure they're getting the most out of their security investments.

Deepen Correlation and Analysis of Data

AI can do more than humans in this regard. AI is capable of processing larger amounts of data in a shorter period of time, and it’s also able to analyse data with greater precision than human analysts. This means that an AI-driven security operations centre (SOC) can handle even more alerts in a timely manner, giving security teams the ability to quickly identify threats and incidents which could otherwise escape notice.

In addition, AI has the potential to correlate disparate pieces of information from disparate sources so that each piece generates new insights about malicious activity or unexpected anomalies. It does this by learning from past events and making predictions based on what it’s learned—a process called machine learning—and therefore gaining an understanding of how its environment operates over time as well as across different domains. For example: if one piece of malware is found on multiple machines within one network segment, but not any others; then there may be cause for concern because such behaviour might indicate a targeted attack against one organisation rather than widespread exploitation by cybercriminals who just happened upon these vulnerable systems through random scanning activities.

Gather Intelligence

The AI-driven security operations provides advanced threat protection. The increased scalability and intelligence of the platform enables you to protect your endpoints with speed and detection of response, enabling you to be more proactive in your approach to security.

Using AI driven platforms for endpoint security will help detect threats faster than ever before, allowing you to respond quickly without having to analyse data manually. AI driven platforms for networking & security operations are capable of analysing huge amounts of data in a very short time frame enabling them to provide actionable insights that can be used in real-time scenarios.

Scalability and Intelligence is Increased

Through the application of AI and machine learning, security operations can be scaled to meet the growing demand. Networking and IT administrators can use AI to automate repetitive tasks such as vulnerability scans, patch management, and configuration changes. The result is a faster deployment of new services and improved productivity for less cost.

AI also allows you to scale your operations with increased intelligence. With deep learning algorithms at its core, your AI platform will learn from past incidents and activity data so that it can help predict future events by detecting anomalies in real time based on historical data patterns across all types of events for all data sources in your organisation (including emails, web logs, network flows). This will improve both speed and accuracy when handling security threats - making it easier for you to respond quickly while reducing false positives from false alarms generated by traditional solutions like SIEMs or NSM systems which require manual intervention before being able to react appropriately.

Take Action on Vulnerabilities Found

Once you’ve identified vulnerabilities, automation can help you close them quickly. Automation is key to closing the time-to-fix gap.

Most organisations today struggle to find and fix vulnerabilities in a timely manner because they have too many high priority tasks that need human attention. AI helps by automatically identifying vulnerabilities, taking into account their severity and prioritising them based on business risk (as opposed to just severity). The result? Organisations get better at closing vulnerabilities faster because of AI’s ability to understand context and prioritise accordingly.

Using AI makes security operations faster more intelligent and efficient.

AI can help with threat detection and response. It will be able to detect threats faster, more accurately and with less false positives than humans. AI can also correlate data at a much greater scale than humans, which means that it can find connections between seemingly unrelated activities that would take humans a long time to uncover.

AI will also give you an edge in intelligence gathering. Due to AI being better at collecting information than people are, this means that you'll have an advantage over your adversaries who don't use AI for this purpose (and probably aren't even aware of its existence). If you're trying to gain intelligence about some target network or system, then using AI could give you real insight into what's happening there before anyone else figures it out on their own -- which could help prevent future attacks against your organisation before they happen.

With the increasing complexity of networks, AI is a great tool to help with threat detection and response. It can also automate many processes that used to take up valuable human resources. It’s important to keep in mind that AI still needs humans behind it, so don’t let it replace your security team or engineers. Instead use it as an extension of their skillsets.

Sources:

1.] Forbes, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2019/11/04/10-charts-that-will-change-your-perspective-of-ai-in-security/?sh=10546eee68b7

2.] Statista, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1028823/ai-security-use-cases-in-organizations/