Tapping the Potential of AI in Health Data Security

The ability of artificial intelligence to look for patterns in vast volumes of data - including large collections of unstructured data, which are commonly found in the healthcare sector - is presenting new potential ways for bolstering the security of patient information, says AI expert Navin Budhiraja of outsourcing vendor Infosys. "The nature [of healthcare data], how rapidly new [challenges] are appearing and how large and complex those systems are becoming, are making the security problems very, very hard," he says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. "So, how do you look at very large amounts of data - not necessarily knowing what you're looking for - and still actually try to find interesting patterns in there around who's accessing what; is their behavior expected or anomalous, and so on? I think the traditional ways of doing security, like where you have an anti-virus system or a particular way your firewall is configured because those are the best practice, are no longer applicable because of this complex IT environment," he says. "And those are exactly the kinds of challenges AI is very good at."