Automating routine maintenance tasks across these assets would save time and allow for a more precise, data-driven approach to upkeep. Here both automation and AI are coming together to provide new solutions.
To understand the impact upon automation and artificial intelligence, Digital Journal heard from Erin Hamm, field chief data officer, Comcast Technology Solutions.
Digital Journal: How will automation and AI tackle asset visibility?
Erin Hamm: As adoption of AI, ML and automation continues, organizations will increasingly be finding new use cases. One area where I expect to see this play out is in automating processes around asset visibility, which has always been a big challenge. Let’s say you are part of a security team, and you have unidentified assets on your network; you notice that one of these assets has touched a certain application, but you don’t know the asset owner to determine if this access is legitimate. Rather than setting off a chain reaction where the security team reaches out to the application owner, who then must go on a fact-finding mission to determine who owns the asset and why it’s accessing the application, an automated process using AI will be able to quickly identify the asset owner and intent. This move toward a more automated and less manual process will be incredibly helpful to both security and compliance teams.
DJ: Will organizations collaborate more?
Hamm: Any new regulations present challenges for compliance, but with the many different rules coming out right now, we are navigating a largely greenfield territory when it comes to technologies like generative AI. Peer-to-peer interactions across companies will increase as everyone seeks to gain clarity on new regulations and ensure they’re in alignment.
DJ: How will companies grapple with new and evolving compliance requirements?
Hamm: Even after alignment with their peers, companies will likely still face heavy scrutiny from their auditors in the wake of these new regulations.
Not everyone has a resource within the government they can reach out to with questions, so I expect we will see more cooperation and collaboration among different companies.
DJ: How are threat hunting and detection evolving?
Hamm: Cyberattackers are incredibly sophisticated and great at evolving their methods. In 2024, we’ll see enterprises double-down on how to evolve their threat hunting and detection capabilities to account for the new mechanisms and methods bad actors are using to exploit organizations’ networks. This is going to include more examination of insider threats and identifying changes in behaviour, especially when it comes to changes in how individuals are interacting with the tools they’ve been using regularly.
For instance, if an engineer in an organization regularly downloads code from GitHub, but they suddenly start downloading massive petabytes or gigabytes’ worth of code from GitHub, is that person a potential risk to the organization? This could be an example of a phenomenon we are increasingly seeing: threat actors getting legitimate credentials and then posing as that user on the network. Being able to identify these situations versus legitimate use by credible individuals will be a major focus of efforts.
