Dubai: Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a stronger role in the cyber security space in the future and the key purpose is to initially help automate mundane tasks, like prioritising security logs, so that companies can reduce the human time and effort. Unfortunately, what mostly happens today is cyber blindness, essentially because there is no way to manually check the huge amount of data that cyber experts process every day. The industry is faced with two options again: to leave the data as it is, leaving the possibility open of looking back to the past to verify data or to develop something, which could help solutions providers to analyse real time logs and take decisions. The second option is called machine learning or AI. More and more organisations are choosing machine learning and artificial intelligence today.

Derek Manky, global security strategist at Fortinet, said that the world is seeing more and more automation being built into black hat attackers' attack technology. What this means is, the time to respond to cyber-attack is shrinking drastically. Ten years ago, weeks or days to respond to a cyber-attack was adequate. Today, "we begin to measure in minutes (less than an hour)". "In the future, we will start measuring this in seconds. Humans cannot operate on this level, and therefore AI is crucial to respond at machine speed to the threat of cyber-attack," he said.