In this BSA series – “Why AI?” – enterprise software leaders explain in their own words how artificial intelligence (AI) is having a positive impact on individuals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. In this submission, Cisco Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration Jeetu Patel writes about how AI can help companies defend against malicious actors.
1. Why AI?
We need AI to combat threats because we need to protect at machine scale, not just human scale. Thanks to AI and the data we now have available, for the first time, I believe the scales will be tipped in favor of defenders rather than the attackers.
With hybrid work and multi-cloud architectures, the threat surface keeps expanding for every organization. Meanwhile, the volume and sophistication of attacks keeps increasing. And the attackers only need to be right once, but defenders need to be right every single time. AI and data will allow defenders to move from detect and respond to predict and prevent.
2. Can you give an example?
I’ll give you three:
- We use generative AI to assist security administrators. They can interact with our AI assistant using natural language to help them do things like define policies, resolve conflicting rules, and implement changes. It can help organizations address gaps in cybersecurity resources and skills.
- We use AI to augment security operations teams. We can process and correlate millions of events in near real time, and surface information that helps responders remediate threats faster.
- We use AI for automation, doing things like taking a backup of an organization’s environment at the first hint of a potential attack, so they can restore quickly and mitigate the damage. It helps improve their security resilience.
3. Where can we learn more?
Cisco has been leveraging AI for years, and we’re making it pervasive across our entire security portfolio. To learn more about Cisco’s AI offerings and how we leverage AI in our products, check out our site here: https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/solutions/artificial-intelligence/index.html
Be sure to check out Cisco’s AI Readiness Index: https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/solutions/ai/readiness-index.html
About the author:
Jeetu Patel is Executive Vice President and General Manger of Security and Collaboration at Cisco, where he leverages a diverse set of capabilities to lead the strategy and development for these businesses and also owns P&L responsibility for this multibillion-dollar portfolio. His team is creating and designing meaningfully differentiated products that diverge in the way they’re conceived, built, priced, packaged, and sold.
