Fujitsu Applies AI to IT Security via Managed Service

Rather than continuing to rely solely on mere mortals to defend IT environments against increasingly complex IT security attacks, Fujitsu America is now making a case for a suite of managed security services imbued with artificial intelligence (AI) to prevent malware from ever penetrating an organization’s defenses in the first place.

Jason Bradlee, head of security for Americas region for Fujitsu America, Inc., says via a security operations center (SOC) that Fujitsu has set up in the U.S., the company is employing a Fujitsu Advanced Monitoring and Unified Remediation with Artificial Intelligence (SAMURAI) platform to automate both the detection of security threats and the appropriate level of response.

Bradlee says SAMURAI provides a holistic approach to deploying security information and event management (SIEM), identity access management (IAM), network access control (NAC), security incident response and forensics software that is all tied into a common AI software. That AI software over time applies machine learning algorithms and analytics to learn the overall IT environment.

“It takes about three to six weeks to set up,” says Bradlee.

At a time when IT organizations are not able to recruit, let alone retain, enough IT security professionals, there’s no doubt other ways of securing IT environments will need to be pursued. The issue is that most IT organizations do not have the skills or resources required to apply AI to cybersecurity defenses on their own.

Bradlee says most IT security technologies in use today are focused mainly on remediation, enhanced by a little bit of malware detection capabilities. The real issue that needs to be solved is how to better secure IT environments that are under constant attack, says Bradlee. Accomplishing that goal requires an AI system capable of learning and adapting to those attacks in a way that allows cybersecurity professionals to focus more of their time and effort on trying to identify more sophisticated types of attacks, says Bradlee.

It’s not clear yet to what degree AI technologies will give IT organizations a better fighting chance to defend themselves. The one thing that is abundantly obvious to everyone is that the measures in place today are not working especially well.