Copilots in Cybersecurity — Realizing the Promise of Precision

May 07, 2024
3 minutes
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There’s been a dramatic leap forward in what’s possible around Precision AI, and security professionals are looking for ways to leverage these advances in meaningful ways. Early instances of copilots within the cybersecurity industry left many practitioners uneasy, as demos and proof of concepts returned erroneous or even offensive responses to standard security-related questions. Relevancy and precision have become the most critical characteristics to the success of GenAI within cybersecurity.

For vendors, this means gaining access to high volumes of high-quality data, applying this data to AI models in meaningful ways, and having the in-house expertise to ensure the expected outcomes make sense. When applied in these ways, GenAI will have a tremendous impact on cybersecurity operations and outcomes as we know them. AI introduces the ability to ask questions in a natural language, producing operational advantages across the board. For example, operations can spend less time pouring through product documentation, leading to faster identification and remediation of critical vulnerabilities.

Supercharging Security Teams

With highly relevant, accurate answers, security teams will become dramatically more effective. Copilots have the potential to dramatically reduce perfunctory manual processes – from pouring through product documentation to metric and milestone gathering for the board. When done right, they have the ability to surface the most important security tasks, explain why they are critical, and more importantly, expedite fixing the issue.

This could be remediating a vulnerability, reining in overly permissive access controls or quickly thwarting an active attack. This also leaves experienced security professionals to focus on advanced security tasks – threat hunting, red teaming, proactive planning and other high-value activities. At the same time, this also makes less experienced team members more effective by increasing their productivity and flattening the learning curve by using natural language to eliminate the need for deep tool expertise.

Achieving Operational Outcomes — Insight Is Not Enough

Although we don’t always like to face the statistics, mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) continue to be the metrics that don’t lie. Copilot solutions need to go beyond delivering timely insight, to helping security professionals ensure these numbers are trending steadily down. This means that cybersecurity copilots need to contribute in tangible ways to alert prioritization, remediation recommendations and even orchestrated counter measures upon human review and approval.

Palo Alto Networks — Leading in AI Through Our Platform Approach

Palo Alto Networks has announced powerful copilot capabilities to revolutionize how customers respond to the latest threats across network, cloud and security operations. Powered by Precision AI, copilots leverage the largest cybersecurity dataset in the world among pure-play cybersecurity leaders. They simplify security by delivering rich insight paired with the extremely accurate security outcomes. New copilots present a powerful addition to Palo Alto Networks’ extensive AI capabilities. This translates into direct operational advantages for our customers including a reduction in the time required to perform key management tasks, faster answers to security questions, and ultimately a reduction in mean time to respond (MTTR).

Take a moment to learn more about Precision AI capabilities from Palo Alto Networks.


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