Is artificial intelligence the future of cybersecurity?

IT infrastructure is increasingly strained by the continued adoption of cloud services (particularly Software As A Service), an increasingly mobile workforce that demands always-on access to corporate resources, and other influencing components of emerging technologies and innovations. 
The growing amount of distributed corporate applications and data also surface weaknesses that are being exploited by cyberattackers. 
Our networks, applications, and data need to be protected against both today’s and tomorrow’s threats, which can only get more sophisticated. 
This protection has to be provided while our networks are quickly evolving, with greater levels of complexity as new cloud and software defined networking (SDN) architectures are rapidly introduced, and the number of endpoints interacting with our networks, including Bring Your Own Device and Internet of Things devices, exponentially expand.
Learning and predicting, thus, is becoming a requirement from our cybersecurity measures. Cognitive technologies can enable cybersecurity practitioners to work with unstructured and semi-structured information to build up curated information bases and knowledge graphs that can then be mined and analyzed by various artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and algorithms such as machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning. Such technologies can “automate” the intuitive abilities of security professionals and both dramatically shorten mean time to discovery and restore some faith in the cybersecurity industry’s ability to prevent breaches in the first place.
Chief Information Officers will have to consider taking a measured and deliberate approach to implementing cognitive technologies for the improvement of security efficacy. Cognitive technology–based security analytics is a completely new approach, requiring planning and involvement from not only security practitioners but also IT professionals and even data scientists. Although it may be intuitive, it is worth mentioning that managing, coordinating, and communicating simultaneously with these groups requires skilled management (and managers) as well.
Cybersecurity cannot be just an afterthought any longer. Only deliberate planning, investing, and partnering on cognitive-based security solutions may be the only way to save resources to fight other fights.

The writer  is research manager and lead analyst at IDC Asia/Pacific.