Why is everyone crazy about AI-powered cybersecurity platforms?

?A cybersecurity platform is a comprehensive centralized solution designed to give businesses a way to integrate security visibility, analysis, and controls across an array of security layers and data sources while enhancing protection, scalability, and performance.

Before the rise of cybersecurity platforms, Organizations had to rely on multiple-point solutions to protect each aspect of their business. However, the more cybersecurity tools an organization deploys, the less effective its defense. Siloed solutions cause security gaps that can be exploited by bad actors. Consolidating data and analytics across the enterprise enables organizations to identify aspects that individual products simply cannot.

Cybersecurity platforms provide rich data gathering capabilities for visibility across all vectors: cloud, endpoint, servers, email, network, mobile, web, and IoT. They integrate with partner products, which supplement their capabilities, and fit within the enterprise’s existing IT ecosystem and workflow. That may include SIEM/SOAR, identity and access management, vulnerability assessment, patch management, IT ticketing systems, threat intelligence, and more.

With expanded visibility and consolidated security functions, a cybersecurity platform can help organizations to better understand, communicate, and manage cyber risk.

Extended Visibility

Nowadays, the need for unified cybersecurity systems is more critical than ever. Security teams and organizations are struggling to manage the increasing complexity introduced by digital transformation, data privacy, compliance, and a growing remote workforce that operates outside the enterprise’s perimeter. The result is an ever-evolving and complicated cyberattack surface that now necessitates a unified approach offering holistic, simplified, and effective control of cybersecurity risks and threats.

On the other side, Organizations must remain aware of the emerging risks and how vulnerable they may be. This is made possible – as well- by enacting a holistic approach to the cybersecurity attack surface lifecycle as part of the security platform. Organizations can now discover the attack surface (visibility into their cyber assets and possible attack vectors), assess the risk (insights into risk exposure and vulnerabilities), and mitigate (enact security controls and response actions), all from a centralized system. By unifying and simplifying insight and control, the Organization is not only able to enhance overall security, but also improve operational efficiency, system performance, and scalability.

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Analysis Centralization

The ability to see and address suspicious activity across the enterprise requires continuous risk and threat assessment. Having a common security analytics engine leveraged across the platform can facilitate this. The Integration (of native security stack and third-party solutions ) across security layers gives detailed insights, analysis, and actionable steps about the different kinds of risks targeting organizations. Upon detection, security analysts can determine the type and source of the threat, if or where threat actors gained access to the system, where they moved throughout the organization, and what actions they took – all from a single console. Because the platform can correlate data and analyze activities as a whole, the organization can quickly identify and respond to events to minimize the impact and expand security protocols, preventing further attacks.

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Managing Risks

A cybersecurity platform includes tools that offer excellent threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities, which are foundational to managing the risk mitigation stage of the cyberattack surface life cycle. The platform tools ensure the right security controls are in place and configured properly for optimal protection. Risk reduction/mitigation is achieved as the platforms help in data breach reduction, visibility and insight improvement, virtual patching, alignment with a compliance framework, and third-party integration.

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Cybersecurity platforms should provide Risk Insights that assess the organization's overall Risk Index by categorizing risk factors to provide visibility and continuous assessment of the risky users, devices, and applications. This includes active risks such as Suspicious or anomalous user activity, Indicators of attack (IoA), behaviors, or detections, and potential risks such as vulnerabilities, exposed identities, or risky cloud app access.

The Risk Insight provides deeper insight into the organization’s health level pulled from endpoint, email, mobile, network XDR telemetry, and other data sources—to uncover hidden risks. It leverages intelligence from leading vulnerability research experts to detect unpatched operating system and application vulnerabilities. Then it allows the security team to investigate at-risk users/devices and take recommended mitigation actions to reduce the organization-wide risk index.

The above risk score is a function that considers two variables: 1. The likelihood of a threat actor gaining access to the corporate environment 2. The potential impact of such an event. Using these factors, the platform presents the result as an integer between zero (“0”) and 100, representing the overall risk to the organization’s assets. With dynamic and accurate visibility into the current security posture, security analysts can make informed decisions about prioritizing and addressing risk

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Integration

No platform can provide all needed security functions; hence, an open API strategy is required for the integration with other systems to support providing critical information for added insight, performing additional security functions, automating tasks and response actions, and other key activities.

A platform is about consolidating and tying it with other sources and systems to provide all the security and connectivity that an organization needs.

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Cloud-Based Architecture

A platform’s value proposition is more effective and efficient security, which can be achieved only with a cloud-based solution that allows organizations to continuously maximize the benefits of the inherent dev-ops process, whereby new capabilities or enhancements are regularly added to keep you ahead of the evolving threat landscape.

The cybersecurity platform advantages the cloud to collect, synthesize, and analyze the high volume of data and activities feeding into the platform providing a level of function, performance, and scalability that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with on-premises solutions.

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Artificial Intelligence

AI-powered algorithms possess the ability to analyze vast amounts of data, identify patterns, and predict potential security threats with remarkable accuracy, which has enabled cybersecurity platforms to provide advanced capabilities that were not possible before such as Attack Path Prediction, Malware outbreak Prediction, and future security-posture change prediction.?

Cybersecurity platforms can also leverage Generative artificial intelligence to help gain better security insights, accelerate threat detection and response, and bolster their defenses. Using a plain-language interface, GAI empowers users of every skill level with generative AI’s powerful analytical capabilities to enhance their performance and productivity including Explaining and contextualizing alerts, Triaging and recommending actions, Decoding complex scripts, Developing and testing sophisticated search queries

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Flexible License Model

The credits model replaces the need for multiple individual subscriptions, enabling organizations with more flexibility in how they can purchase and use the cybersecurity platform. The credits are the common denominator for licensing different components as a single purchase. They are calculated based on the type and total number (user, email, endpoint, server, cloud workload, OT, and network) and required paid apps (I.e., Sandbox Analysis App, Mobile Security , Attack Surface Risk Management, Zero Trust,….).

Credits offer implementation flexibility to apply and adjust credit allocations on-demand to accommodate any changing needs in the business as it eliminates fixed license counts or underused licenses.

?Greatest Line of Defense

With a centralized and constantly evolving toolbox of solutions, a cybersecurity platform is your greatest line of defense against bad actors who are seeking out ways to attack your organization. It’s your foremost way of protecting your organization against cyber threats and increasingly sophisticated attacks.