Aaron Momin
Chief Information Security Officer , Synechron
Cybersecurity
In an era of escalating cyber threats, organizations must move beyond simply keeping pace and embrace transformational changes to manage the exponential growth of threats from cybercriminals, state-sponsored attacks, and increasingly complex cloud-based operating models.
Consider this:
This relentless escalation highlights why traditional defenses are no longer sufficient and tells us why the emergence of generative AI is a potential game-changer in large-scale digital asset protection.
Senior leaders recognize that isolated vulnerability reports and individual metrics fail to provide a comprehensive understanding of layered security, control effectiveness, and implementation maturity. This lack of transparency obscures critical overarching issues and vulnerabilities across the business. Risk management and governance functions, responsible for enforcing IT controls, governing policy, assessing risk, and establishing accountability, are key to addressing these challenges.
Today’s operational complexity, intricate supply chains, and the ever-changing threat landscape demand a shift toward data-driven, embedded governance suitable for the digital age. Achieving this "digital governance" requires more than just centralizing data metrics; it necessitates a strategic data platform approach that accommodates the diverse tools, procedures, and remains agile to technological & regulatory changes within large enterprises.
While a robust data platform forms the foundation of digital governance, generative AI is shaping up to be the transformative force that redefines how organizations interact with operational data and metrics through user-friendly interfaces. By organizing information about assets, applications, vulnerabilities, policies, and controls, generative AI models can be trained to automate key risk management processes: identification, quantification, prioritization, remediation, and regulatory response.
Studies indicate that 40% of organizations believe using AI will improve regulatory compliance, while 69% of executives believe AI will enhance risk assessment capabilities. These trends are driving the development of solutions like our new accelerator RiskControl.AI.
While the potential of generative AI and agentic AI are indisputable in these areas, there are clear challenges in building the foundational pillars of digital governance in the AI era, especially in areas where organizations have proportionately low levels of data management maturity across their IT operations and risk management. That being said, the path to IT maturity involves iterative improvements which can unlock value over time as digital governance can be achieved control-by-control.
Where traditional approaches provide limited relief to the increased scale and sophistication of today’s cyber threat landscape, the promise of efficiency, accuracy, and agility offered by generative AI presents a transformational opportunity for security and risk organizations. In designing RiskControl.AI, we embraced the fundamental principle that toolchain fragmentation and complexity are inevitable for the foreseeable future. We created a control plane that operates above and around your operational and security tools, working at the data level independently from these tools but optimized and configurable for your enterprise. Our RiskControl.AI Accelerator showcases how generative AI and agentic AI technology can provide significant efficiencies and help CISO and CRO organizations regain control over the complex operating environments they are tasked with protecting.