Need for evolved Defences to counter evolving threats

Cybersecurity breaches are now inevitable. Enterprise data is no longer contained within well-defined perimeters. Business operations are conducted across multiple channels, environments, and devices. And as these enterprise vulnerabilities are multiplying, threats are growing in scale and complexity.

The result: The smallest gaps in enterprise security can now be exploited to compromise entire networks and everything connected to them. In this fast-evolving threat landscape, firewalls and antivirus software are no longer enough to keep organisations safe.

Why enterprises need to up their game with AI-Driven Managed Security

Consider today’s enterprise IT environment. Enterprises are adopting connected devices and Cloud technologies to enhance their productivity and efficiency, but they are also giving threat actors multiple new points of entry, and ultimately putting themselves at a greater risk of breach and data theft.

To counter this, security teams need to constantly monitor all the data their enterprise generates across their entire IT stack. However, it is impossible for human experts to conduct in-depth threat analysis on the sheer volume of data a modern organisation generates every day. Manually going through security logs and incident reports is an exhaustive process which considerably delays the detection of an attack.

Often, threats can remain undetected within enterprise networks for weeks, and the mean time to respond (MTTR) to an ongoing breach can extend to several days.

And the enterprise security situation is further complicated by cybercriminals’s constantly changing their tactics. Threat actors now use advanced technologies—such as artificial intelligence—to launch highly-customised attacks at scale, further amplifying the impact of their attack campaigns. Traditional security tools—and their signature-based and rule-based models of threat detection and prevention—are simply not equipped to tackle such sophisticated attacks.

CISOs need to understand this: using traditional cybersecurity measures to tackle next-generation threats is the same as bringing a knife to a gunfight. CISOs need to implement security solutions which are agile, effective, and swift. And this is where cutting-edge cybersecurity offerings—such as Managed Detection and Response (MDR)—enter the picture. Equipped with advanced security analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities, MDR elevates enterprise security operations to a whole new level.

AI-Driven MDR: What Enterprises Need

AI-Driven MDR solutions use AI’s massive computational power to hunt for threats that traditional security technologies cannot detect using signatures and correlation, helping Threat Hunters identify outliers. The AI platform automatically separates false positives from actual security incidents with unparalleled speed and precision, triaging only the most relevant alerts for the security team to further examine. This alone reduces the average dwell time and MTTR from weeks and days, to (barely) minutes and hours. The solution also provides security teams with highly contextual insights during an ongoing breach, driving more accurate and data-driven decisions. This swift and precise security response contains the attack to a localised area during threat mitigation, thus minimising the risk of the threat spreading into a major breach.

AI-Driven MDR service helps enterprises detect attacks in the very early stages through proactive threat anticipation. The solution constantly collates threat data and trends from across the globe, and then applies it to the specific context of the business, preparing security teams for potential attacks and allowing them to shore up their defences well before new attacks strike. Breach response and incident forensics, which are integral part of the MDR service offering helps security experts understand the attack’s exact path and plug exploited vulnerabilities to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.

In today’s connected era, your cybersecurity can no longer be an afterthought— it must become an integral part of your long-term enterprise growth strategy. To begin, recognize that preventing security breaches from ever occurring is now an exercise in futility. Instead, prevent major security incidents by detecting, containing, and mitigating breaches as soon as possible.

With the stakes constantly increasing, enterprises – particularly CISOs – need to re-evaluate their approach to cybersecurity. They must understand the value that AI-led MDR services can add to their business operations. That, more than anything, is the need of the hour.

By Jose Varghese, EVP & HEAD, MDR SERVICES