Discover what CISOs prioritise when it comes to cloud integrity, the talent gap and cyber threats ...

As a professional in the AI and digital transformation spaces, it's always thrilling to be able to share how AI will improve individual lives, and society as a whole, in meaningful ways. I was especially delighted to have been on a panel with Simon Davies from Splunk on reimagining the public-private alliance for customer experience (CX) innovation.

It was a brilliant conversation on the role that data and AI can play in providing great CX, particularly on the back of the pandemic. It was also timely as more conversations are beginning to emerge about the CX for brand or governmental touchpoints, which defines the citizen experience.

The imperative on how these delightful, digital experiences are delivered is the security aspect of it. We can agree that a seamless experience or transaction means nothing if compromised. We spoke at length on the state of security across APAC in 2022 and how AI can play a meaningful role.

As a result of the pandemic, we’re seeing three times the level of investment into AI in health than we are in any other sector.

If we’re looking at our near-term needs, Australia alone will need 160,000 new data scientists by 2030 just to keep up with the speed of emerging technologies at the nexus of cyber security, cyber defence, AI and machine learning. That’s a lot of talent that we’ll need to develop and train over the next eight years.

Until then, malicious actors are not going to stop attacking our vulnerable systems, and that’s where Simon highlights how Splunk can step in to multiply IT teams’ limited resources in response to these threats. Splunk has leveraged its global relationships to look more deeply into the matter, and here are the results.

Their State of Security 2022 report surveyed 1,227 security and IT leaders in 11 countries and 15 industries on what keeps them up at night — including concerns on cloud integrity, the shortage of tech professionals and the most urgent attack vectors for companies today.

The topline figures are less than encouraging: In 2022, 51% (2021: 42%) report business email compromise, 39% (2021: 27%) of organisations report insider attacks, and 40% (2021: 28%) of respondents report a regulatory violation. With data security issues on the rise, what exactly is going on — and how do we deal with them?

Companies are failing to contain the data explosion

The shift to using cloud and cloud deployments of applications is rising. Today, 39% of organisations have a cloud-first policy, whereas only about 20% of organisations still think they need to go the on-premise route. The move to the cloud is leading to an exponential explosion in data, which presents security challenges as we’ve never seen before.

Add the recent global pandemic on top of that, and things are only tougher.

“One of the things we saw was many, many more workers going remote. Many organisations needed to think differently about how they delivered the customer experience to meet the changing customer needs during this time. And, obviously, data was a big part of that,” explains Simon.

He told me that not only was there a large amount of data generated, but cybersecurity also became a much bigger concern. On the commercial side, the team at Splunk saw two-thirds of CIOs say they are now regularly briefing their boards on cyber risk, and nearly 80% of organisations are aware of or experience some form of ransomware attacks. Some 27% have increased their spend on technology around things like multi-factor authentication.

According to Splunk's latest research, 79% of global respondents say they’ve encountered ransomware attacks and 35% admit one or more of those attacks led them to lose access to data and systems.

However, against this backdrop, security teams are having a hard time containing these threats. More complex threats like ransomware present themselves by the day while having fewer people to deal with them. While tech talent has been a perennial issue, the Great Resignation has deepened the talent crunch. Companies need to look towards automating their threat detection, analysis and response to overcome these challenges, especially in supply chain security.

Securing supply chains

Ninety per cent of organisations — nearly everyone — reported that they had increased their focus on third-party risk assessments due to major attacks like SolarWinds, Kaseya and Log4Shell on their critical supply chains.

Forty per cent of survey respondents said that their organisation had been affected by a supply chain attack. These supply chain attacks will soon change how software is bought and sold, including having buyers require a software bill of materials to list the elements within a complex software package to accelerate vulnerability identification.

New attention to this attack vector has led 97% of organisations in Splunk's survey to take action, including increasing their cybersecurity budget and engaging management on supply chain security. Fifty-four per cent of respondents say that such discussions accelerated actions, and another 38% say these actions wouldn’t have taken place otherwise.

Splunk is working with customers to rethink their response to data security challenges with Web 3.0 innovations like blockchain and non-fungible tokens to secure traditional, physical supply chains. These discussions increasingly include how customers can protect their supply chain assets as these organisations increasingly digitally transform — including introducing more automation into their security posture.

“AI is a key technology for us in Splunk when we model user behaviour, analytics, threat detection and more. It's a constant challenge to figure out how we increase the accuracy of those algorithms to properly identify threats and false positives,” reveals Simon.

“Our machine learning capabilities are trained on the volume of data that’s now been generated by the many organisations that have access to more data than ever before. But, at that same time, they have to understand what to do with their data. We see that conundrum a lot, particularly in financial services, public sector and health systems, where you have very large communities,” he adds.

Furthering the data and AI discussion

There’s so much more to this discussion and I invite you to download Splunk’s State of Security 2022 report if you’d like to dive deeper into what over a thousand CISOs have to say about data security.

You can also catch my discussion with Simon on CX innovation for the public and private sectors here to get a more nuanced look into how both sectors can work together to improve outcomes for customers and citizens, including how we need to start acting ethically with AI.

In AI, we talk about trying to avoid unintended harm. We know within three to five years, there'll be many new regulations, laws, requirements and standards that restrict business dealings to companies that can demonstrate or are certified to have ethical or responsible technology approaches. Customers will certainly demand this as a part of their CX with the brand or governmental touchpoint.

To this point, .conf22, Splunk's upcoming three-day conference for innovative data professionals like yourself, is happening next week. It is Splunk’s most anticipated customer and partner event of the year and there are some exciting sessions surrounding our pursuit to master AI and ML in data and security. It is free, virtual and filled with compelling keynotes and guest speakers. Learn more here: https://conf.splunk.com/