AI technology has become widespread and accessible to hundreds of thousands of IT security professionals worldwide. Human researchers are no longer behind their computers crunching the data and numbers, nor should they be when AI technology is available. The increase in computing power, especially through economical cloud solutions and easy-to-use tools, has allowed a much wider range of users to apply sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to solve their problems. At the same time, companies and security vendors have realized how difficult it is to fight cyber criminals who are constantly evolving to find new ways to infiltrate corporate networks without being spotted. For IT teams, updating and maintaining security solutions and policies to keep up with this volatile threat landscape is extremely costly and an unsustainable solution to protecting against incoming threats.

Security strategies need to undergo a radical evolution. Tomorrow's security devices will need to see and interoperate with each other to recognize changes in the networked environment, anticipate new risks and automatically update and enforce policies. The devices must be able to monitor and share critical information and synchronize responses to detected threats. One nascent technology that has been getting a lot of attention recently, lays the foundation for such an automated approach. It's called Intent-Based Network Security (IBNS).

Just as organizations can use artificial intelligence to enhance their security posture, cybercriminals may begin to use it to build smarter malware. This is precisely why a security fabric approach is needed -- security solutions for network, endpoint, application, data center, cloud and access working together as an integrated and collaborative whole -- combined with actionable intelligence to hold a strong position on autonomous security and automated defense. In the future, we will have attacker/defender AI scenarios play out. At first, they will employ simple mechanics. Later, they will play out as intricate scenarios with millions of data points to analyze and address.