Data Visibility & Protection Endpoint Security

Can AI and ML Bridge the Cybersecurity Skills Gap?

February 13, 2020

It is estimated there will be more than 3.5 million vacant cybersecurity jobs by 2021. As companies face an ever expanding threat landscape and pressure to be able to detect and mitigate threats faster, bridging this skill gap is critical.

Without humans to fill the void, organizations have been turning to the potential of using artificial intelligence (AI) or, more aptly, machine learning (ML) to scale out the capabilities of their existing, limited teams.

It’s not that we don’t have plenty of people working hard on solving cybersecurity problems, but that they need leverage and magnification, and machines offer that potential.

Machines deliver on speed and scale 

Machine learning has the ability to conduct the data analytics that humans find challenging or time-consuming when dealing with massive volumes of data. When properly trained, it is able to find patterns and identify the signals that matter when it comes to threat detection and recognizing anomalies. Machines can do this faster than humans, and in a world where cybercriminals also use AI and ML, speed and scale are everything.

If we take the behaviors of cybersecurity professionals and the data they’ve acted upon in the past, and train a machine using machine learning to identify those patterns and behaviors, and put them together, we can build something very powerful. This doesn’t even require full-fledged AI;  it merely requires machine learning and in fact, in most cases it probably just requires a little bit of statistics. But by doing that, we get to magnify the capabilities of that core set of people we do have, to help fill that skills gap.

We humans don’t know which signals matter until we are able to detect patterns by analyzing large volumes of data. This takes time. Machines can achieve this far faster, giving cyber security teams the advantage of speed. With Absolute, we have collected more than a petabyte of data. With such a massive volume of data, we have the wherewithal to sift through that and look for the signals. Most of this will come from software and hardware inventories, the signals about load on the system, behavior of users, finding what’s a pattern and what’s an outlier.

Using Absolute to tighten endpoint security

Organizations use Absolute as part of their endpoint security posture. Absolute Persistence is installed in the BIOS at the manufacturer and cannot be uninstalled by a user even if they uninstall the operating system. Absolute Resilience provides complete visibility into the endpoint, giving organizations details on device usage, location, which apps are installed, and the ability to freeze and wipe data if a device is compromised or lost.

A big struggle for a lot of organizations is that they’ve bought various solutions, they lay it on and have a dozen different agents installed on the endpoint. But each of these controls get deconfigured and deinstalled, and often you don’t know what you don’t know. Having a single source of truth with the persistence that it will always be able to draw the data from the endpoint no matter what the user does, that is what Absolute does to give organizations to determine what value they are getting from these tools and to improve their security posture.

Learn how Absolute Resilience can secure your endpoints and help you bridge the cybersecurity skills gap.

 

 

 

Data Visibility & Protection Endpoint Security

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