Harnessing the Power of AI and Platformization to Secure your Organization

By Anand Oswal, SVP and GM of Network Security, Palo Alto Networks

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous, with uses touching many aspects of our personal and professional lives. Predictive text makes typing on smartphones more efficient, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants provide customers with instant support, and most recently, generative AI has enabled lightning-fast content generation by leveraging sophisticated algorithms capable of understanding and mimicking patterns in data.

But just as AI can make common tasks and processes easier for the average person, bad actors are also utilizing it to launch evasive and damaging cyberattacks more quickly than ever. For example, of the 11.3 billion threats that Palo Alto Networks blocks on an average day, 2.3 million of those threats are new and unique attacks that have never been seenbefore. As threat actors evolve with even more advanced attacks, how can enterprises keep up?

Cybersecurity can’t depend solely on human intervention anymore. Organizations need to harness the power of AI to automate real-time attack prevention, eliminating the manual efforts that up to recently formed the backbone of cyber threat response.

For the defender to truly stay ahead of the adversary, the most effective approach involves simplifying the dizzying array of disjointed security tools through platformization. Consolidating multiple solutions into tightly integrated platforms helps to eliminate security gaps that arise when deploying individual point products that separately address narrow issues. This is crucial because issues born from unnecessary complexity, such as misconfigurations and unused or underutilized security controls, are the cause of the vast majority of cybersecurity incidents.

Reducing complexity via platformization is necessary but not sufficient on its own to improve cybersecurity outcomes.Tomorrow’s cybersecurity platforms must integrate the latest in AI advancements to automate the detection, prevention and remediation of millions of new and unique attacks every day with unsurpassed accuracy. In order to achieve this level of precision, these systems must learn from vast quantities of attack data sourced from thousands of organizations globally, leveraging that data to protect against the unknown, instantaneously. In short, better data results in an improvedability to fight bad actors and dramatically better security outcomes.

To help meet the needs of this evolving attack landscape, Palo Alto Networks recently introduced a suite of new AI-powered solutions to help enterprises utilize the capabilities of AI in a way that is secure by design.

This comprehensive offering utilizes a proprietary system called Precision AI to secure business data and application ecosystems by discovering, detecting and preventing even previously unseen cyberattacks. Precision AI uses three types of AI in tandem: machine learning, deep neural networks and generative AI. The unique way that these work together provides visibility into the entire AI ecosystem, including model, applications and resources, to reduce the risk of data exposure and security incidents.

It is now possible to leverage AI-powered defense to identify and block AI-generated attacks with near real-time detection. Delivering AI as part of a platform reduces risk while simplifying operations, allowing organizations to focus on their business objectives. Most importantly, this approach leverages the power of AI to supercharge cybersecurity and create even better outcomes for enterprise customers.