What is the Role of Artificial Intelligence Solutions in Data Security for Businesses?
Protecting your customer data is an essential measure for companies to take. For one, leaks of customer data lead to loss of customer trust and that results in them not using your services. Also, data leaks come with hefty fines from the government as you are required to protect your customer data. However, it is not an easy task. Organizations must remain two steps ahead of hackers.
This is where artificial intelligence solutions come into play. Malicious elements of society are using this technology to wreak havoc on the internet. On the other hand, protectors can also use the technology to mitigate such threats.
In this post, we will discuss the role of artificial intelligence services in strengthening your defenses against cyber threats.
What are Artificial Intelligence Solutions in Cybersecurity?
Artificial intelligence solutions in cybersecurity refer to the use of AI to improve digital systems and data protection. For this, it leverages technologies like:
Natural language processing
Generative AI technology
Machine Learning
Neural networks
Artificial intelligence solutions superpower is at the disposal of both the hackers and the protectors. However, the one who is not using the technology well is at a disadvantage. The artificial intelligence solutions in cybersecurity enable businesses to create bespoke solutions and protect their proprietary information from the clutches of hackers.
What are some Common Threats Faced by the Cybersecurity Industry?
Cybersecurity must face a range of unique challenges, including:
- A huge attack surface.
Multitudes of attack vectors for cybercriminals to exploit.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of devices to protect in every organization.
Few skilled security professionals can manage the growing safety demands of global organizations.
Massive data sets that are far beyond human-scale processing capacity.
The amount of data that needs to be classified and protected is increasing at a never-seen-before pace. Therefore, businesses must start incorporating artificial intelligence services for the best results.
AI Cybersecurity Solutions – Making Data Protection More Robust
Three-layered Approach to Data Security
(Create a flow chart of Discovery – Classification – Protection)
Effective data security platforms follow a three-layered approach for complete data protection. It addresses security challenges by leveraging the framework: Discover, Classification and Protection.
The use of artificial intelligence solutions in these three layers helps businesses secure sensitive data and ensure better protection and proactive threat management. It is a structured approach to data security that aligns with industry insights.
Now, let us look at how each of these three layers benefit from inclusion of AI in data protection.
Discovery: Locating & Mapping of Sensitive Data
The first and foremost step in data security is finding the data that needs protection. In this, artificial intelligence solutions play a major role as they can automate the discovery process at scale. In more complex distributed and cloud environments, manually finding the data that needs to be protected is challenging.
AI-powered tools come in handy here as they can scan data in real-time, identifying all files, databases, and repositories across the company's data estate. In turn, it offers a complete view of the organization's data posture, which includes mapping of both active and inactive data sets. Here, it can help find forgotten legacy systems and orphaned data.
Classification: Understanding & Categorizing Data
After the process of discovery, the next step is classification. Here, the focus is on accurate data classification to determine the true level of sensitivity. In this procession, artificial intelligence solutions automatically tag data with precise labels, like public, confidential, or restricted by understanding the context around it.
Moreover, it can tag data with customer bespoke labels, by applying regulatory classifications that align with compliance requirements.
Generally, the legacy data security tools are not accurate in data classification as they are based on rigid rules. They use pattern matching based on regular expressions or dictionary-based classification, which can produce inconsistent results. These can miss the nuances in data patterns, which may lead to misclassification of information, unnecessary access restriction, or exposure of sensitive data.
AI leverages context-aware algorithms and advanced machine learning models to identify complex data types, resulting in a more dynamic classification framework that offers high accuracy.
Leveraging artificial intelligence services shows their true potential when used with unstructured data, which is commonly found in most document stores, emails, etc.
Protection: Risk Assessment, Control Access & Risk Mitigation
The last layer of the data security framework is protection. It uses proactive measures to continuously monitor systems, ensuring that security protocols remain effective in managing the ever-evolving threats.
AI-powered cybersecurity solutions are competent in evaluation of security configurations, identifying vulnerabilities and suggestions prioritized measures for remediation. Additionally, artificial intelligence solutions in cybersecurity can detect gaps in employee security practices, creating roadmap of targeted training to mitigate human errors and improve organization's security posture.
Moreover, AI technology ensures that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive data and can view it.
Lastly, the use of artificial intelligence solutions improves threat detection by identifying unusual access patterns or suspicious behavior, flagging potential threats in real time. The proactive approach ensures that the security personnel can protect the company from all data breaches before they occur.
Artificial Intelligence Solutions – For Extensive Data Security
Inclusion of AI across data security layers of discovery, classification, and protection assists organizations in effectively finding, classifying and securing sensitive data. Businesses can leverage artificial intelligence solutions to neat the potential threats in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Businesses that choose to use AI in their cybersecurity efforts will build more resilient infrastructure, reducing vulnerabilities and ensuring data protection across its lifecycle.