Why businesses need Autonomous Cyber-Defense in the new decade

Every other day, we keep hearing about some data theft, customer data being compromised and loss of consumer faith, organizational reputations being tarnished and so on. This sudden spurt in cyber-crimes is largely because hackers have gotten smarter and are deploying the latest technologies to execute their mala fide intentions. Organizations are fast realizing that just adding more people to the equation isn’t enough. It’s time we pitted (good) machines v/s (bad) machines to improve our cyber-defense fabric.

With cyber-security now on the top of every CEO’s priority list, one of the most common questions customers ask me is how to strengthen their cyber-defense capabilities. No wonder global spending on information security was anticipated to reach $124 billion last year, as per Gartner. There’s immense pressure on the CIO, as the entire company looks up to him/her to fully secure their business.

With their organization’s mission-critical systems under constant threat from burgeoning viruses/hacks, CIOs today are in a highly vigilant state throughout the year. Despite this, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to protect data - the lifeblood of any business. Major breaches can cost companies millions in the short term, something that a number of companies have learnt the hard way in the not too distant past. That’s not all. From a long-term perspective, rebuilding trust with customers can prove to be a monumental task.

What’s alarming is that many enterprises still operate suboptimal security systems. Let me give you a more specific scenario – a good number of organizations still fail when it comes to following data encryption as necessary practice. To add to the complexity, even when a company attempts to encrypt its data, owing to the lack of a proper, comprehensive data security governance and management strategy, the risk of data loss is still very much a challenge, as per findings from Gartner.

Security is hard

With the evolution of IT into an increasingly open environment, complexities with respect to security have only expanded. Partly because we’ve seen organizations take a piecemeal approach to IT - often a result of procuring disparate servers, operating systems, databases and other products - and then trying to interconnect them, leading to an unintended but complex puzzle.

In such a scenario, we are now witnessing a cyberspace battlefield, where everybody is under a potential attack. How IT leaders and their teams think like combatants may well mean the difference between making and not making the right security choices each day, exposing your business to grave risk.

Time for a new cyber-defense model in the new decade

Why do you think hacks are rising in variety and sophistication? The people behind them are leveraging modern machines to propagate their mischief, and with state-sponsored apparatus at times. In such a scenario, it’s observed that many businesses are still fighting the battle against intelligent (but malicious) robots by adding more people to their security cadre. If anything, in the battle of machines versus humans, manual intervention is often found to be inadequate, ineffective and several times slower.

If your organization has to stand any chance of winning this cyber-war and protecting its data - the new currency in the digital economy and a catalyst for innovation - then you must upgrade to an autonomous cyber-defense system, powered by advanced machine learning, and one that’s fully automated.

Pitting the good v/s bad machines

Smart CIOs are fast realizing the benefits of adding autonomous cyber-defense systems to their arsenal - for example, the autonomous database - for enhanced protection. Given that attacks are rising in number as well as complexity and variety, now is the time for businesses to look at their security strategy through a new lens. By pushing machines to the forefront, businesses can improve their cyber-defense to neutralize even the most advanced cyber-threats.

By Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director, Oracle India