Proliferation of cloud computing in the market has been remarkable as benefits gained from cloud based services are abundant, enabling organizations to reduce cost without losing business agility and achieve economies of scale. This growth in the Cloud Computing has led to the increasing penetration of Internet of Things (IoT) and has become the most lucrative emerging market. However, the growth of both, Cloud Computing and IoT, have been threatened with the several security issues, and the volume and severity of the threats have been growing at an alarming rate.
According to a recent study by Damballa, a computer security company focused on advanced cyber threats, on an average an organisation deals with almost 10,000 malware alerts every week of which only 22% are considered reliable and only 3.5% are deemed worthy of further investigation. In an interview Damballa VP Asia-Pacific & Japan - Daniel Schneersohn, said, “Monitoring the network for malicious behaviour is always the best way to tackle security issues, however, old methods of security are prevention-based and not designed to deal with emerging technologies like the IoT.” He also mentioned that, “Despite the industry’s best efforts, the IoT will never be 100% secure because of its interconnected nature and securing the every smart connected device may not even be possible given the disparity of operating systems.” According to him the only way to tackle this would be the network be made smart enough to automatically detect the malicious behaviour.
The system solution if designed to be flexible, adaptable and be able make decisions on its own, to segregate the threats and understand which of these are worth investigating and then not only upgrade itself to tackle such threats but also the entire system with minimum or no human intervention, is the only solution one can think of. Programming today has moved into the realm of cognitive computing, and only thing that can match to the description above is Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), inspired by biological immune systems, is one such technology, applications of which are believed to help enhance intrusion-detection systems and tackle computer-virus problem. The research conducted so far is preliminary in nature with almost no commercial implementations so far.
Other AI techniques like that of Genetic Algorithms, Heuristics, Data Mining, and Neural Networks have also been applied to new-generation security solutions. However, if we take into perspective the functioning of the bodies of the vertebrates, the source of inspiration for the development of these technologies, combining all of them together might give us the best of the solutions to tackle the problem.
Clearly, AI-based techniques with ability of unsupervised learning, could turn out to be indispensable tool in fighting cyber-attacks, since the corporate structures are becoming more dynamic with the inclusion of bring your own device philosophy in place.
http://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-cloud-database-security-software-market-industry