Artificial intelligence and automation are reshaping the digital defense landscape. Businesses are engaged in a constant race to counter cyber threats, and the effectiveness of cybersecurity systems plays a vital role in determining future market success.
Microsoft (MSFT) announced Security Copilot, an AI-powered cybersecurity assistant that uses AI to sift through vast amounts of data to detect threats. Palo Alto Networks (PANW) announced Cortex XSIAM 2.0 to automate security operations centers. The next big thing? It is a fully autonomous security system that is fully powered by AI and does not require humans.
Enterprises will increasingly adopt zero trust policies. This means that even current employees will require biometric authentication for network access. Selfies and thumbprints will become the norm rather than written passwords.
Regulations require publicly traded companies to disclose attacks and threats. People in other professions, such as investment advisors, may soon face similar requirements.
The reason can be seen from the numbers. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, global cybercrime costs are expected to reach an estimated $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.
Here’s how businesses are protecting themselves.
Reporter Madison Mills discusses which companies can benefit most from expanding cybersecurity.
video transcript
Madison Mills: Cybersecurity is advancing at the speed of AI with automation revolutionizing digital protection. Businesses are currently racing to stay ahead of cyber threats. Future market winners and losers may be determined by who future-proofs their cybersecurity systems.
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What can consumers and investors prepare for when it comes to what’s next in cybersecurity? Joining us for a discussion is Fatima Boulani, Co-Head of U.S. Software Equity Research at Citi This is Mr. There is also Shailesh Rao. He is the president of Cortex Corporation. That is Palo Alto Networks’ cybersecurity division. Thank you both for joining us. I am truly grateful.
Shailesh, I’ll start with you. Because you are leading this cybersecurity division in one of the world’s largest cyber companies. Please tell me about your future. What is the next big innovation your team will come up with to address cybersecurity concerns?
Shailesh Rao: Thank you, Madison. Hello. It’s great to be here. There has been a significant increase in cybercriminals taking advantage of the latest technologies out there, whether it’s AI or machine learning. This is the same thing that is available to us as well as all other companies. These technologies are used to infiltrate and hack businesses and demand ransoms.
Therefore, our focus as a leading cybersecurity vendor is to ensure we leverage these technologies and stay ahead of the curve. As long as we stay ahead of attackers, we have an advantage and can protect businesses and governments around the world. And that’s our focus.
Madison Mills: And Fatima, I think your focus is on investigating which companies are best suited to meet some of these concerns. Please tell us the names of listed companies that you currently rate as “buy.” I know you have a couple. Please tell me a few things.
Fatima Boulani: absolutely. To distill a lot of what Shailesh was talking about on the topic of cybersecurity, some of the names we talk about a lot with our institutional clients are Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, CyberArk. , the price he is less than $10. A company with a market capitalization of 1 billion. All of these names have very strong ties to some of the very themes you mentioned in your opening remarks.
Madison Mills: And Fatima, please stay here. These are stocks of listed companies in the cybersecurity field. What about wildcard investments, such as some publicly traded companies that are affected by the cyber world but are not necessarily focused on cybersecurity?
Fatima Boulani: That’s an important question, Madison. I’m glad you asked. So while I don’t want to frame it completely as a wildcard, what I can share with you is that the names that characterize cybersecurity as unconventional initiatives in that they expose their subjects and assets to all kinds of pain points are my own. This means that it certainly exists within our coverage area. Organizations need to address issues related to cybersecurity. Names that come to mind here are Datadog, Dynatrace, and HashiCorp.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, these companies are not traditionally defined as cybersecurity companies. In fact, they operate in the realm of observability and DevOps. But each of these companies has a part of their portfolio specifically focused on filling organizational blind spots around developers who are building applications and building applications very quickly. I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase “move fast and break things.”
And when you do that, you introduce even more risk to your organization. And those three assets that I mentioned earlier are where organizations actually add or manage their exposure to risk that could be exposed to external attackers or malicious actors from an application security perspective. Contains some useful portfolios.
Madison Mills: Fatima, back to the topic. But Shailesh, I want to bring you back here. Typically, when I hire someone from a company, I ask them how they differentiate themselves from their competitors. But with an ever-changing issue like cybersecurity, are competitors in the space, even publicly traded companies, any more of a friend here?
Shailesh Rao: The cybersecurity industry requires some level of collaboration. Because at the end of the day, Madison, we’re all dealing with the same bad guys on the other side. So, to some extent, we’re all on the same side in this fight. But I believe that ultimately, at least in this new world, companies that can leverage AI and machine learning will have an advantage.
So we’ve been doing AI and machine learning for over 10 years. Many people may think that ChatGPT only became popular in November 2022, but this is not new. In fact, we have been using AI and machine learning. Palo Alto Networks currently collects over 1 trillion bits of data every day. So we make one decision every day. We detect 1.5 million new attacks not seen yesterday.
Imagine its scale. This is a level of scale and precision that no one else in the industry can offer, and that’s what we’re focused on. Because at the end of the day, a critical metric in cybersecurity is whether looking at all available data can protect a company from known attacks and reduce average time to detection.
This is the time it takes to detect if something is wrong with your system. Reducing that time to just a few seconds can provide significant benefits when it comes to taking action against threat actors. Therefore, our focus is to protect everything we know and reduce the average time to detection of new things. That’s what we focus on.