In the cybersecurity industry, artificial intelligence plays a dual role. AI is used both as a weapon of attack and defense. More businesses now utilize cloud computing services to maximize their operations and profits. 60% of businesses worldwide use cloud services to store their corporate data. This factor is giving more prevalence to cloud security. As the digital landscape constantly expands, it is becoming necessary for businesses to implement artificial intelligence processes into the Cloud Security architecture.
Defending the on-premise security perimeter is becoming more and more complex and onerous day by day. Therefore, cloud service providers (CSPs) are investing more resources to make infrastructure and managed services increasingly secure. Considering the ability to implement more and more artificial intelligence functions in services, the cloud will soon be an increasingly privileged environment in terms of cybersecurity.
How Is AI Being Used to Enhance Cloud Security?
Thanks to advanced tools, such as AI, machine learning, and automation, the scope of the cyber-attacks is constantly growing. You must evolve and leverage the same AI techniques to prevent attacks. Below we will discuss how artificial intelligence is used to enhance cloud security.
Threat Detection
Artificial intelligence is heavily implemented in User and Entity Based Analytics (UEBA) cybersecurity solutions. It allows organizations to identify threats based on software’s signatures and helps them detect deviations from normal behavior in the target environment. AI can help your IT teams track and evaluate the network traffic using cloud-based AI-powered network security tools.
Detecting threats and attackers in real time and taking immediate action protects your business from major cyberattacks. Considering that the cloud providers are now providing in-built cybersecurity solutions, the cybersecurity tools are now democratized that were previously cost and skill prohibitive. These solutions are designed to improve your cloud’s security posture, considering that the security architecture can be scaled as your business workloads scale.
Anomaly Detection
AI can help you detect anomalies by identifying trends and patterns in vast datasets. AI in a cloud environment can provide your IT team with well-informed and data-backed intelligence. This is done by comparing the historical data with the most recent corporate data. When an anomaly is detected, AI-powered systems can raise a flag and alert the cybersecurity teams. Thanks to this proactive approach, any damage to critical corporate data can be prevented.
Predictive Analytics
Knowing what will happen next helps you analyze and forecast future trends. This information holds the key to competitive differentiation and growth. Future predictions also help you solve problems and respond to future changes with great agility and speed. The advanced data analytics and big data machine learning capabilities of artificial intelligence can provide you with predictive insights about your cloud infrastructure.
The AI tools use the data in your cloud and process it through a statistical model that it formulates, trains, and modifies to generate predictions. Some other techniques which may be used for predictive analytics in the cloud include regression analysis, decision trees, and neural networks.
Data Management
With the ever-increasing amount of corporate data, data management is one of the biggest challenges that your business might face. Artificial intelligence plays a critical role in managing, processing, and structuring data over the cloud.
Thanks to its impeccable capability to acquire, modify, and manage reliable real-time data. It constantly notices unusual patterns in the system and helps detect fraudulent activities. The breach of sensitive data may put your business in deep legal or financial trouble.
Automated Responses
Artificial intelligence can be used by cybersecurity professionals to monitor and control critical workflows. It allows them to focus on the strategic operations that drive significant business value while handling tedious tasks. By letting you perform data analysis without human intervention, intelligent automation makes your business more strategic, efficient, and insight-driven.
Benefits of AI in Cloud Security
Organizations are now using very sophisticated machine learning algorithms to trace baselines and standard behaviors, on the basis of which to verify everything that differs from normality. Based on the degree of a discrepancy, it can be determined whether these are false positives or actual attacks. The great cybersecurity revolution introduced by AI lies precisely in the ability to identify false positives. With less human intervention, AI can help mitigate threats that might be missed by humans. Also, AI can even respond to incidents and block cyber attacks on its own.
Cloud platforms can handle big data, which refers to the large volume of data that organizations generate daily through multiple sources, including transactions, social media, and clickstream data. Big data is a valuable asset that can help you optimize business processes, identify new business opportunities, and improve decision-making. However, the storage, process, and security of such data might be challenging. Using artificial intelligence allows you to delegate your cybersecurity tasks to automated technologies and ensure auto event detection and blocking.
Ethical Concerns Around AI-Powered Security Measures
An improperly configured AI system can introduce potential security vulnerabilities to your cloud infrastructure. Using AI capabilities, hackers are able to identify vulnerabilities and security holes with greater efficiency.
AI also lets them modify the attack code much more quickly. Considering the tremendous amounts of data that AI utilizes, it may provide hackers with sensitive information that may require to steal data or carry out attacks.
Privacy Concerns Around AI-Powered Security Measures
Artificial intelligence is designed to capture data, learn and evolve on its own. If your corporate data consists of customers’ personal information, GDPR compliance must be your top priority. GDPR compliance prohibits your business from storing unnecessary personal data, including consumer and vendor information.
When AI is implemented into cloud security platforms, it collects large amounts of data to discover patterns. Therefore, you should make strict privacy policies to prevent data leaks or breaches when using AI in cloud computing.
The Future of AI Cloud Computing
With advanced machine learning and AI algorithms, it is expected that artificial intelligence will completely replace the traditional cybersecurity techniques that only detect known threats. Unfortunately, the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning lets attackers devise sophisticated techniques to steal or damage your corporate data.
If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it is imperative for you to focus on security and user experience besides focusing on innovation and digital transformation. Your cloud infrastructure should always be ready to fight AI with AI.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is redefining cybersecurity in cloud services. It allows you to identify threats, automate cybersecurity processes, improve security operations, and reduce the cost of cybersecurity in your cloud infrastructure. Now is a vital time for deciding if you should implement AI cybersecurity practices in your business.
