Kathy Gibson reports – Artificial intelligence (AI) has a huge role to play in securing our future.
This is the word from Callan Abrahams, principle AI consultant at iOCO, speaking at the Veeam Unplugged event in Johannesburg.
“We spend a lot of time talking about the value that AI will bring to our businesses,” she says. “But all of that advancement and innovation will mean nothing if our businesses are not secure.”
We can’t innovate while putting customers, investors and employees at risk, she adds. “So we need to ask the question: Who are we really fighting? Is it deepfakes, is it AI, is it bots?”
What is certain is that AI doesn’t have intent, desire or personal goals, she adds. “So who does have malicious intent? It is the criminals; and this technology is in the hands of these criminals.”
For this reason, generative AI (GenAI) is one of the biggest threats facing organisations.
“So why should we not use it to make it a fair fight?”
We don’t really have an option, Abrahams says: we have to use AI to fight the attacks.
The reality is that there are hundreds of thousands of jobs unfilled in the IT world, specifically in the areas of backup and security.
“So let’s make it a fair fight.”
AI can be employed to enhance threat detection ad response, for automation and efficiency, and to develop a scalable and proactive security posture.
The way it can do this is through the deployment of technology like AI-enhanced detections systems, realtime threat analysis, network defence, dynamic AII-enabled security policies, and collaborative AI defence networks.
“With all of this, how do we know if we are winning?” Abrahams asked. “So we need to remember who we are doing it for; and we are winning when all of the stakeholders – investors, customers and employees – are happy.”
Investors are interested in risk reduction and reputation security; employees want to know their information is protected and they have workplace stability and customers care about data safety and service integrity.
AI could reduce losses by up to to 30% through faster threat response, Abrahams says.
It also helps to cut operation costs by about 15% to 25% via automation; and lowers fraud-related losses by an average minimum of 20% with improved detection.