Darktrace: We're not here to get rid of security teams

Darktrace is seeking to help humans operate at machine speed, says director of analyst operations Alex Marsden

In her presentation at this week's Computing Deskflix Cloud Automation event, Alex Marsden, director of analyst operations at AI-powered cybersecurity vendor Darktrace, outlined the risks posed by organisations' increasing use of cloud services.

First, though, she sought to allay fears that handing over aspects of security to machine learning meant the end of the profession.

"We're not here to get rid of security teams," Marsden said.

"We understand the value of the human, and we're here to help scale that human problem using machine learning."

The human component will always be essential, because each organisation is unique, and its needs, plans and strategies are the domain of people, not machines.

One of those organisational strategies is the increasing use of cloud. Marsden quoted a statistic that 96% of UK organisations now use some form of cloud computing.

The challenge comes in integrating security across the various cloud platforms, which are all, to an extent, functional islands. Marsden quoted a statistic from Cybersecurity insiders that only 22% of organisations feel they have adequate visibility in the cloud.

From a security point of view, the worrying thing is the speed at which attacks can hop from one cloud to another, which is made easy by having siloed security controls.

Therefore, security integration across these platforms is vital.

"Darktrace works hard on this integration piece, making sure that we're keeping the security team up to speed," she said.

"Not only does the team have to get to grips with the wealth of technology, they also have to regularly configure manually fine tune, which takes a huge chunk of time."

The role of automation in the multi-platform age is to try to take care of those time-consuming tasks, which grow with the spread of platforms as well as increasing incident volumes, she added.

"Making decisions at machine speeds can be highly challenging for humans. We're allowing them to get on with everything else they have to contend with."

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