Can AI protect companies from data breaches?

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Recently, Air India, Dominos, and BigBasket were victims of cyber attacks. In the Air India cyber attack, the data of 45 lakh customers was compromised.

In the case of Domino’s the data of 18 crore customers was on sale on the dark web which included their personal details.

The data of 20 million users of BigBasket was leaked on the dark web, which included their personal details and their personal address.

Upstox, an India based discount stock broker that enables its users to buy and sell shares suffered a data breach which had exposed some important data of people including their bank account number and their personal information like mobile number and email address.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made the functioning of organisations a lot easier and in the near future can be used in protecting organisations from data breaches.

Soon, AI will even have the ability to fund its own attacks via crypto-currency platforms, automatically channeling profits with no human intervention.

AI as a defense strategy

As with most technologies, the capabilities that AI provides are ‘agnostic’ – they can be used for both defense and attack, and their success in both areas depends on the strategies and investments underlying them, added a TechMonitor report.

“AI has been used in a variety of ways when it comes to cyber security. Whether it is threat detection, malware defense, penetration testing, AI based systems have proven pretty effective in not only detecting issues but also mitigating them in some cases,” said Vikram Mehta, Ex-CISO MakeMyTrip/Goibibo.

He further added that when the adversaries out there are powered with low cost computing, unlimited time at their hands and need only one chance to beat security solutions, AI becomes an effective tool in accelerating detection and response mechanisms.

This is, however until AI is also leveraged by the adversaries machine to machine.

Cybersecurity is one of the multiple uses of artificial intelligence. A report by Norton showed that the global cost of typical data breach recovery is $3.86 million.

The report also indicates that companies need 196 days on average to recover from any data breach.

For this reason, organizations should invest more in AI to avoid waste of time and financial losses, and when used along with machine learning, and threat intelligence can recognize patterns in data to enable security systems to learn from past experience.

In addition, AI and machine learning also enable companies to reduce incident response times and comply with security best practices, added an IEEE Computer Society report.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the holy grail of every organisation, as it tries to better understand its customer. This is especially the case post COVID-19, as user behaviour has undergone a change and is continuing to evolve.

Businesses, especially financial institutions are going through the most interesting transformation seen in recent times. This has been powered by AI, amongst other technologies.

Cloud Adoption

Cloud providers will need to focus on enhancing and integrating security, compliance, and privacy into their offerings.

Cloud will also grow in popularity as the ideal execution venue for technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain, and edge computing.

“Public cloud adoption has been on the rise over the last decade or so due to increased digitization, ease of use, cost and scale.

The pandemic has only accelerated the rate of public cloud adoption since the need for digitization was inevitable; and is also here to stay.

Needless to say, just like any digital landscape, public cloud comes with it’s own set of security issues to address, which would need to be complemented by cloud security solutions such as cloud security posture management, container security and threat detection” added Mehta.

The Indian Public Cloud services market is expected to reach $9.5 billion by 2025.

According to IDC’s ‘Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker’, report, cloud services revenue reached $3.6 billion in 2020 and grow at a CAGR of 21.5 percent.

The Indian public cloud services (PCS) market, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

For the second half of 2020, the Indian public cloud services market totalled $1.9 billion, the research agency said.

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