Today’s security challenges requires more intelligence to identify and prioritise threats that in turn increases the workload of security analysts with more alerts and anomalies to process than ever.
Global leaders in banking and finance, education, healthcare, and other key industries have joined a new cyber security beta programme developed by IBM Watson.
Sun Life Financial, University of Rochester Medical Center, Avnet, SCANA Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, California Polytechnic State University, University of New Brunswick and Smarttech will be amongst 40 organisations testing Watson’s ability to detect and protect against cyber crime.
Watson for cyber security takes advantage of IBM’s cognitive technology, which is being trained to understand the language of security. By applying intelligent technologies like machine learning and natural language processing, Watson can help security analysts make better decisions from structured data, as well as the vast amount of unstructured data that has been dark to an organisation’s defenses until now.
A recent study from the IBM Institute for Business Value shows that nearly 60 percent of security professionals believe emerging cognitive technologies will be a critical part of changing the tides in the war on cybercrime.
“Customers are in the early stages of implementing cognitive security technologies,” said Sandy Bird, chief technology officer, IBM Security. “Our research suggests this adoption will increase three fold over the next three years, as tools like Watson for Cyber Security mature and become pervasive in security operations centers. Currently, only seven percent of security professionals claim to be using cognitive solutions.”
Beta customers involved in this programme are leveraging Watson in their current security environments to bring additional context to their cyber security data. New use cases demonstrate:
The IBM Institute for Business Value recently surveyed over 700 security professionals to gauge perspectives on the challenges, benefits and opportunities for cognitive security technologies.
Nearly 60 per cent of those surveyed believe that cognitive technologies will mature soon enough to significantly slow down cybercriminals in the near future. While only seven per cent said their organisations are currently in the process of implementing cognitive security solutions, 21 per cent said they will implement these solutions over the next two to three years, representing a three-fold increase in adoption.
Security professionals also said that the top benefit they expect to see from cognitive technologies is improved detection and incident response decision-making capabilities, which was indicated by 40 per cent of respondents. Currently, the average data breach takes organizations an average of 201 days to identify and an average of 70 days to contain.
As development of Watson for Cyber Security continues, IBM continues to build more advanced analytics and cognitive capabilities into other areas of its security portfolio and includes the following:
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