Securing the digital age: cyber security essentials

There’s no going back. Since the 2020 pandemic, businesses have gotten to grips with digital transformation and developed a new understanding of its potential to unlock growth and prosperity.

It’s exciting to see this happen across every industry. But, regrettably, one of the sectors fastest to exploit this opportunity is criminal enterprise. Cyber crime is booming like never before.

We know that cyber security will make or break the digital business. It’s the number one enabler, allowing us to build customer trust, business resilience, and investor confidence. Yet too many organisations are still working with a cyber defence model that was designed for a simpler age when IT resources and data were kept behind a locked door with access strictly controlled. 

Those days are gone. Today, data, applications, and services flow ceaselessly around global networks, through the cloud, across millions of digital devices in vehicles, in shops, in streets and offices and factories, and in our hands.

Of course, it’s understandable that businesses want to keep their cyber security operations close to home. It’s a boardroom priority, with genuinely existential implications if things go wrong. But such is the extent of malicious activity that traditional defences – even with support from the most highly skilled human experts – cannot keep up. 

We’ve passed the limit of what human beings can do to protect the digital business. We need a new model, one that goes looking for trouble before it finds us.

We know this from our experience at BT and managing security for customers – from large multinational enterprises and governments through to SMEs. Like many of our multinational customers, we’re a big global organisation that’s been around for a while. We’ve wrestled with the transition from legacy to digital. 

We’re investing in digital transformation to provide our customers with the networks and services they need to achieve their ambitions. We’ve experienced first-hand what this means for cyber security and can see it’s time for a step change.

The digital business needs cyber security to work in the same way that we enable the safe operation of self-driving vehicles: with sophisticated modelling and deep reinforcement learning that constantly looks out for, anticipates, and outmanoeuvres new threats and vulnerabilities, and enables human beings to make better decisions.

It’s an evolution that mirrors how self-driving technologies have been adopted, from having both hands on the steering wheel, through the introduction of driver aids such as cruise control and automatic transmission to the ultimate aim of a fully self-driving vehicle with the driver simply supervising the journey.

This is the principle behind our new Eagle-i cyber security platform, which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and automation to learn through experience, foresee and outwit malicious behaviours. Eagle-i is a game changer, which will help us address the epidemic of cyber threats with confidence.