How AI Is Taking Data Security to a New Level
In increasingly complex IT environments, companies are finding it harder and harder to protect sensitive data—not least because more and more AI systems are interacting with it. But AI can also help improve data security on several levels.
Negative reports about artificial intelligence are on the rise. It is increasingly viewed as a security risk. But AI can, in fact, also enhance security: When AI is used in data security, the goal is not only to prevent the worst-case scenario but also to better protect data throughout its entire lifecycle. This is where AI can truly showcase its strengths. Security specialist Forcepoint explains the details:
- AI understands content: Until now, classifying data has been a tedious and time-consuming task because files largely had to be assigned to individual categories manually. AI significantly speeds up the process and reduces the workload on employees, as it understands content and can categorize and tag it independently. Since it also takes context into account, it can distinguish between truly sensitive data and supposedly sensitive data, resulting in fewer misclassifications. Furthermore, it has no trouble recognizing sensitive information, even if only excerpts are shared or the format changes—for example, when confidential content from documents appears in an email or a screenshot.
- AI identifies patterns and anomalies: AI is incredibly good at detecting patterns and anomalies in large amounts of data—and it does so almost in real time. This makes it perfectly suited for analyzing monitoring data and logs to identify unusual activity within the infrastructure that may indicate a threat to data security. In doing so, it can aggregate and correlate information across various systems to provide a comprehensive picture. Events that appear harmless on their own but are part of an ongoing attack are thus properly classified and assessed.
- AI tailors measures to the risk: Rigid policies are hardly sufficient to manage the data risks of the modern workplace, because data is continuously processed and exchanged between different employees, applications, services, and locations—and, increasingly, between AI agents as well. Either the policies are too restrictive, hindering employees and agents, or they are not strict enough, leaving gaps in protection. AI can analyze activities and their context, determine the specific risk, and dynamically adjust policies. Depending on the type of data involved and what is being done with it, activities are either approved or blocked, approval processes are initiated, or protective measures—such as encrypted data storage—are enforced.
- AI provides suggested solutions: Security experts often find it difficult to make sense of the flood of alerts generated by many traditional systems. AI is capable of analyzing, clustering, prioritizing, and enriching these alerts with context in a fraction of a second. Managers can then make better and faster decisions than ever before—especially since AI now also provides them with specific recommendations for action and proposed solutions. For example, when new AI tools are introduced, AI assistants automatically generate guidelines that can be adopted directly or customized with minimal effort.
- AI improves awareness: With AI, companies can raise their employees’ awareness of threats—whether through training tailored specifically to their existing knowledge and roles, or through realistic phishing tests. AI can also increase awareness when integrated into the normal workday by pointing out lapses in security and, for example, alerting employees to risks when forwarding an email with an attachment to an external recipient or advising them to encrypt files when downloading them to an external storage device.
«AI makes security teams more efficient and effective,» explains Fabian Glöser, Sales Engineering Manager at Forcepoint in Munich. «They have less manual work to do and can focus on critical cases and the further development of the security strategy. Doing without AI is really no longer an option, because in a world with AI agents, the cloud, and remote work, data risks can no longer be managed using traditional methods.»
Source: Forcepoint
This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/wie-ki-die-datensicherheit-auf-ein-neues-niveau-anhebt/
