While artificial intelligence (AI) is simultaneously being weaponised by malicious actors and increasingly deployed for cyber defence, it is just a piece of the puzzle when it comes to cyber security.
This is according to Jason Oehley, regional sales manager at Arctic Wolf Networks, who was speaking ahead of the ITWeb Security Summit.
AI has come to the fore as a hot topic in cyber security due to the fact that cyber criminals are both harnessing AI and targeting AI, while organisations are looking to AI to bolster their defences.
Oehley notes: “Local customers are becoming extremely concerned about the impact of AI on the environment and the increase in attacks. A major challenge for them is finding the skills resources and putting the investment in place to build and manage a proper security operations environment – particularly for smaller and mid-sized enterprises. But unless you have that security operations capability or partner, with highly efficient AI on the backend, wrapped with highly skilled people who are helping you manage your entire security strategy and security posture, you're going to struggle.”
He says: “While AI is a revolutionary technology, it is just a piece of the cyber security operations puzzle. It still needs a human to input what's required and a human to verify what the output is. So you've got to have a balance between artificial intelligence and then human intelligence. The AI does a lot of the heavy lifting – for example, when you’re trying to find a needle in a pile of needles – but you also need to bring in human intelligence to understand the business context, take that intelligence and adapt it to the organisation and its cyber security strategy.”
Oehley says organisations need expert security operations partners to mitigate modern cyber risks. “Partnering with a company that's focused on cyber security can help not only to detect and respond, but also support proactive security, with highly skilled security engineers and security analysts that take away the heavy lifting from the customer, so they can focus on what's actually core to the business,” he says.
He notes that global partners have access to vast volumes of data, which is crucial for supporting AI: “We have a cloud service-based approach to cyber security, with over 10 000 customers on our service and around eight trillion security events we take on board into this platform every week. The value of that is in order to make a really efficient security environment, you've got to feed lots of data into machine learning algorithms and the AI engines. Having that huge amount of data gives us a huge amount of global context around risk that we can build back into this platform, and be a lot more efficient in how we combat cyber risk in each of our individual customers.”
Arctic Wolf is a gold sponsor of ITWeb Security Summit 2025 Cape Town, which will be staged at the Cape Town International Convention Centre on 27-28 May. Oehley will present a talk on ‘AI-based security: The new dawn in cyber security’ at the event. At the summit, Arctic Wolf will also showcase the capabilities of its Aurora Platform, a cloud-native security operations platform powered by Alpha AI, and its Aurora Endpoint Security.
The Johannesburg ITWeb Security Summit will be held at the Sandton Convention Centre from 3-5 June.
For information and to register, visit https://www.itweb.co.za/event/itweb-security-summit-cpt-2025/ or https://www.itweb.co.za/event/itweb-security-summit-2025/.
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