Microsoft May Marry AI and Cybersecurity the Best in the 2020s

For the implementation of AI in cybersecurity, my bet is on Microsoft. This is also because of the strategic cybersecurity acquisitions and focus on AI they have implemented in recent years.

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In 2015, Microsoft bought Adallom for $320 million and Secure Islands for $150 million. Two years later it bought its fourth Israeli startup, Hexadite, for $100 million. Now under the Microsoft wing, those startups became the core of its local cybersecurity R&D operations.

Microsoft understands the future of AI's impact where the cybersecurity industry has a major skill-shortage.

In February, 2020 it was announced that Microsoft is expanding its enterprise antivirus software to iOS and Android. The move marks a bid to become the dominant cybersecurity provider for large companies. Microsoft engineers and executives spoke to Business Insider about the AI systems that power its Defender antivirus software.

You can read Microsoft's own blog about it here.

You've heard about Azure, but what about Azure Sphere? Azure Sphere—Microsoft’s answer to escalating IoT threats—reaches general availability. Find out more about it here.

I think it's notable that Microsoft's Defender software, its enterprise antivirus offering, will be available for iOS, Android, and Linux later in 2020. It shows how seriously Microsoft is taking the space and cybersecurity in general.

When we think of Microsoft as one of the most and best diversified business platforms in the world, we don't necessarily think of cybersecurity, yet.

Microsoft has the capability to crush future cybersecurity startups, or acquire the good ones. So how is AI being implemented in cybersecurity? Defender relies on machine-learning systems that detect anomalous behavior, both with insider threats and potential phishing scams. 

Microsoft trains its AI using a wealth of signal data from existing users of its software, and it hopes this technical advantage will make it a more appealing provider than one of the dozens of security startups that have appeared in recent years.

With 5G rolling out soon and IoT becoming even more of a thing Microsoft’s integrated security solution for IoT devices and equipment—is widely available for the development and deployment of secure connected devices. That's Azure Sphere. So with these two major announcements Microsoft is now a cybersecurity player for real.

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 Microsoft has announced new capabilities in AI and automation that make it a decent cybersecurity bet for the future in addition to all of its other value. As a major Cloud company now, Microsoft is able to use the cloud to harness the largest and most diverse set of signals – with the right mix of AI and human defenders – that can turn the tide in cybersecurity.

If you want one of the world's leading companies at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity, you have to look at what Microsoft is doing.

Just how significant is their investment in this? The AI capabilities built into Microsoft Security solutions are trained on 8 trillion daily threat signals and the insights of 3,500 security experts. 

Attackers will cross multiple domains like email, identity, endpoints, and applications to find the point of least resistance. We badly need AI to help protect us in the next generation of cybersecurity.

Microsoft Threat Protection or MTP is showing off an increasingly augmented "automated" element to how it protects us from threats in our business and in our work. In 2020, MTP looks across domains to understand the entire chain of events, identify affected assets, and protect your most sensitive resources.

Azure Sphere itself has four layers. In the 4th industrial revolution of IoT of connected devices, a connected IoT environment, remote actors are able to affect or monitor not just the digital environment but also the actual physical environment. So that creates all sorts of risks that need to be addressed. Microsoft is poised to become a global leader in cybersecurity in the 2020s, if all goes according to plan.

Microsoft as an antivirus providers compatible with smartphones is a world where Cloud, edge and device security is everything. However implementing AI in cybersecurity is not new for Microsoft.

Azure Sentinel, the first cloud-native SIEM with fusion AI technology turns huge volumes of low fidelity signals into a few important incidents for security professionals to focus on.

In December 2019 alone, within Microsoft, Azure Sentinel evaluated nearly 50 billion suspicious signals that in practical terms would be impossible for people to manually analyze and emitted just 25 high-confidence incidents for SecOps teams to investigate.

Microsoft's innovations in cybersecurity are considerable in 2020. Can they be among the global leaders to leverage AI in the field? Time will tell, but the Cloud is on their side. They did after all beat Amazon's AWS to the Pentagon contract for a reason. It wasn't so long ago, on October 28th, 2019:

Subscribe to the top right on the Last Futurist, for more content like this. Politics and stock markets aside, Microsoft's diversified business model means its cybersecurity division and products across its ecosystem should improve considerably in the 2020s.