Top Priorities in 2024: Security and AI
January 17, 2024 Alex Woodie
Two sometimes opposing forces will be at play in 2024: the threat of cybersecurity breaches on the one hand and the promise of tech disruption thanks to AI on the other. Tech leaders, including IBM i professionals, who chart a course through these obstacles will be well-positioned to help their companies and their careers in the years to come.
First, let’s cover security. It’s no secret that cybercriminals have been ramping up their game over the past few years. Since the Covid-19 pandemic gave online activity a turbo-boost four years ago, cybercriminals have been having a field day with people’s and companies’ sensitive information. There is no sign that will let up any time soon.
The $32 billion in unemployment funds that fraudsters lifted from the State of California at the start of the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 may seem like the coup de grace for the ill-inclined. But in fact, it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the vastness of the ocean of fraud that occurs on a daily basis.
Consider the recent estimate of cybercrime by Cybersecurity Ventures, a security research and publishing group based in Northport, New York. In its 2022 Cybercrime Report, the company forecasted that damages from cyber security events would grow from $6 trillion in 2021 to $10.5 trillion by 2025. By comparison, it was only $3 trillion back in 2015.
“If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China,” writes Steve Morgan, the editor-in-chief for Cybersecurity Ventures.
In early 2023, more than one-third of executives polled by the Deloitte Center for Controllership say they were targeted by cybercriminals in the past year. “Nearly half (48.8 percent) of C-suite and other executives expect the number and size of cyber events targeting their organizations’ accounting and financial data to increase in the year ahead,” the company said.
As cybercriminals grow bolder, security-loving tech leaders have only one choice: Lock sensitive data down as much as possible.
“Implementing financial security operations – something you could call FinSecOps – means protecting financial data,” Daniel Soo, a principal in the cyber and strategic risk division of Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory, said in a press release. “Asking finance, accounting and security functions to team closely to manage FinSecOps is one preventative step we’re seeing leading organizations take, so that they are agile enough to mitigate threats to financial data and help enable business growth.”
As the calendar flips over, cybercriminals are switching up their techniques. One thing security pros should be on the lookout for this year is a resurgence in malicious hyperlinks. According to a Hornetsecurity analysis of 45 billion emails, malicious links increased by 144 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year. That number could increase if email sees a return to popularity as a way to connect with customers, which some experts are predicting as a result of the looming death of cookies.
Companies should take a proactive approach to dealing with the threat of malicious links, says Daniel Hofmann, Hornetsecurity CEO. “The boom in malicious Web links and steady rise in phishing demonstrates that organizations cannot underestimate the damage such threats can cause, and must ensure they use next gen security service while also maintaining security awareness throughout the workplace,” he says.
The rise of artificial intelligence promises a different kind of impact on companies. Depending where you sit on the spectrum, AI could either be the key to unlocking new business growth, or the downfall of companies that fail to adapt to new tech.
As the world’s bigwigs gather in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum this week, the prospect of mass job disruption due to AI was raised by the International Monetary Fund, which issued a new report that concluded up to 40 percent of the world’s workers will be impacted in some way due to AI.
The impacts will be wide ranging across geographics and industries. In some cases, AI will cause job losses, while in others, AI will actually foster the creation of new positions where human employees work together with AI.
“We are on the brink of a technological revolution that could jumpstart productivity, boost global growth, and raise incomes around the world,” writes IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva in a Sunday blog post. “Yet it could also replace jobs and deepen inequality.”
Up to 60 percent of jobs in high-income countries will be impacted, dropping to just 26 percent for low-income countries, the IMF analysis found. Within a given country, “workers who can harness AI seeing an increase in their productivity and wages,” the IMF stated.
Workers that sit behind a desk are usually seen as most at-risk for displacement due to AI. The capability of computers to interpret and generate language has increased dramatically thanks to advent of large language models (LLMs) such as Meta’s Llama-2, OpenAI’s GPT, and Google’s Bard.
The early results for using so-called generative AI techniques have proven quite promising, as computers show they can handle moderately complex tasks, such writing custom emails to marketing prospects based on a database file of customer names and addresses. After a year or so of kicking the tires with GenAI, companies will be in a rush in 2024 to figure out how to deploy GenAI to boost productivity in real-world production settings, and get the competitive advantage before others.
While the tech looks hopeful, would-be GenAI adopters face a handful of hurdles to overcome. This includes practical questions, like whether to train your own LLM or use a pre-trained one, how to engineer prompts, how to utilize retrieval augmented generation (RAG), how to deal with LLM hallucinations, and how best to secure private data, as well as questions about ethics, transparency of models, and how not to run afoul of new AI regulations, such as the European Union’s forthcoming AI Act and a host of others.
As a platform dedicated to business process automation, IBM i is destined to cross paths with AI at some point. It’s certainly something that IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will is keeping a close eye on.
“IBM i is probably internally already using AI for some problem determination,” Will said during a recent appearance on an N2i webinar. “But [we’re] also working with some of our customers on specific projects that they want done with AI to make sure that we invest in the things that are going to actually make the most difference to our customer base. And you’ll hear more about that as we go through the first couple quarters of this year.”
Taken together, security and AI pose two mega-trends that tech executives cannot ignore. IBM i shops are insulated in many ways from tech trends, including many security threats that target industry-standard servers as well as things like containers, which again are closely linked to X86 platforms. But the magnitude of AI and security developments are so great that they demand the close and upright attention of IBM i decision-makers.
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