When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, surveys show that enterprise decision makers are most excited for the technology’s potential to make their companies more efficient and nimble, but some of the greatest possibilities lie in its ability to make systems more secure.
According to a report by HfS Research and IPsoft, 59% of surveyed C-Suite executives said they were pleased by the security benefits of their Artificial Intelligence (AI) implementation. “Improved security is an unanticipated benefit of cognitive technology projects,” the report states. “Many cognitive tools have security and privacy in-built by design. We are now getting used to machine learning and AI providing threat intelligence, detection and response.”
Conversely, only 13% of respondents consider improved security to be a top priority for deploying AI. We anticipate that more enterprises, as they plot out AI deployments, will be pleasantly surprised to learn how intelligent solutions such as AIOps (formerly 1Desk) and Amelia are specifically designed to detect fraud, stop network attacks and monitor for business anomalies at scale.
Ubiquitous Monitoring and Mitigation
AIOps empowers companies to seamlessly integrate existing systems into a central autonomic backbone. This integration enables companies to monitor multiple systems at once in real-time. Not only does this system-wide Event Monitoring functionality enable AIOps to identify problems resulting from technological failures, but it can also identify malevolent forces attempting to access a company’s digital operations.
These events might include things such as an unauthorized software download on an employee’s networked device, infiltration from an unrecognized IP address, or a sudden spike in unauthorized payments. AIOps proactively alert relevant human employees about any suspect event, and it also can independently address the issue by following a relevant standard operating procedure (SOP) to mitigate any further damage. For example, the platform can automatically freeze payments to a suspect party until they are confirmed and released by a relevant employee.
Automation for Increased Privacy
Since automations remove human involvement from business processes, they inherently make handling personal information more private. For example, a company can use AIOps for the employee onboarding process, including the delivery of laptops, phones, systems access, corporate credit cards, and travel accounts (depending on the needs of the new employee). Some information may include personal or private information that the new employee may not necessarily wish to share with one of their colleagues, such as a credit score when applying for a corporate card. AIOps maintains the employee’s personal privacy throughout the process.
A new employee can be guided through the onboarding process via Amelia, the industry-leading digital colleague embedded inside AIOps. With Amelia, the process can now take place with limited-to-no human intermediation – which eliminates many potential opportunities for exposure of an employee’s private data.
Security at Scale
As fast as companies can evolve their technological defenses, you can be assured that “the bad guys” are evolving their own cyberattack methods with similar speed. Another benefit of tying an entire system into one central platform is that new security protocols can be implemented at scale instantly.
For example, a pair of security researches recently demonstrated the potential to bypass voice authentication technology using synthetically generated speech. You can imagine that any Chief Security Officer who included voice authentication as part of their security protocol would suddenly find themselves with a problem. Fortunately, with AIOps, that CSO could easily add a new security layer for any access points that previously relied on voice authentication. Furthermore, AIOps can provide a list of all users who have successfully used voice authentication in the past several months to provide an historical audit and confirm that security protocols were met.
Without all systems unified into a central platform, a CSO would need to implement changes and research past access across numerous platforms, which could be a timely and difficult process. With AIOps, the changes can be implemented universally at the speed of electrons. The platform’s ability to make rapid changes at scale can be a useful feature for any decision-maker involved with compliance issues or any other global process that requires regular updates.
AIOps and Amelia provide a company’s IT and business leaders with a powerful suite of tools that can not only unify and automate business systems, but provide levels of enterprise-grade security required for today’s digital ecosystems.