Ask any analyst, reporter, or financial observer, and they’ll tell you that the security market is ripe for consolidation. For years, security vendors have proliferated, buoyed by high valuations and ever-expanding enterprise security budgets. While this rush to innovate has resulted in better and more sophisticated threat defenses, it has also created a complex web of tools which already overworked, overwhelmed, and understaffed security teams must manage.

This tool sprawl is one reason that so many in and around the security industry believe that an era of consolidation is coming. According to ESG Research, 66 percent of businesses are actively working to consolidate their security portfolio. For many in the security industry, a security platform that essentially puts your “SOC-in-a-box” is an ideal solution to the tool sprawl problem.

But this approach is not without peril. If the security industry consolidates to the point that there are just a few platform solutions, this will not only stifle innovation, it will result in a monoculture – and monocultures are notoriously susceptible to disease. If every organization uses an identical or nearly identical set of security tools, breaking into one means breaking into them all. And once threat actors figure out how to break in once, they’ll have the keys to every organization. Just like the world banana population – itself a monoculture – is currently being wiped out by a fungus to which is has no natural resistance, a single cyber threat could take down a vast number of organizations.

In the case of cybersecurity, heterogeneity of defense systems is itself a defense, so security teams need to approach consolidation differently. In this session, attendees will learn:

• How a data-first approach to security architectures can illuminate natural consolidation points
• How collaboration with other parts of the IT organization can actually improve security posture and reduce tool sprawl.
• How this collaborative approach also creates opportunity to leverage other parts of the organization to improve security posture through smarter processes and practices.

In a world that is increasingly digital, cyber-attack has become the most significant risk confronting today’s businesses, smart cities, and critical infrastructure. Online crime cost the world more than half a trillion dollars last year, while recent attacks have managed to influence the U.S. presidential election and disrupt the Ukrainian power supply. This troubling state of affairs is the product of several fundamental weaknesses with the traditional approach to cyber defense, which relies on predefining what threats look like at a time when criminals launch never-before-seen attacks on a daily basis. Moreover, these attacks increasingly strike at machine-speed, preventing security professionals from responding before their damage is done.

As a fundamentally unique approach to security, cyber AI systems need not predict tomorrow’s attacks based on yesterday’s threats. Powered by recent advances in artificial intelligence, the latest cyber AI security systems instead continuously refine their defenses by learning ‘on the job’ to differentiate between normal and abnormal behaviour in an enterprise, enabling them to flag even subtly malicious activity. Thus, whereas traditional cyber security technologies are blind to unknown threats, self-learning cyber AI systems detect such novel attacks by spontaneously drawing connections that human programmers can’t see. And as ready-to-deploy exploit kits and advanced malware packages spawn new cyber-threats around the world, the challenge of securing the digital realm can only be met with AI security systems that can learn, evolve, and fight back.

In this session, you will learn:

• Where cyber-criminals have found weaknesses in legacy approaches to security
• Why only self-learning AI can detect and stop never-before-seen attacks
• How to protect your network from machine-speed attacks
• What gaining 100% network visibility of your entire digital estate — including cloud environments and IoT devices — can reveal the latent vulnerabilities that advanced attackers are targeting today