Generative AI has fundamentally changed the makeup of the enterprise IT infrastructure. Its introduced new opportunities and innovations and influenced new requirements to secure and govern adoption while maintaining business continuity. As businesses integrate private and public AI applications into day-to-day operations, the complexity, volume, and sensitivity of data being used for training and prompting demands novel solutions.
At the same time, IT and security operations have benefitted from stronger, generative AI-influenced cybersecurity outcomes through anticipatory and predictive insights, tailored remediation recommendations, script decoding, and custom automations. These two trends — happening in parallel — are easily contrasted as “Cybersecurity for AI Enterprise Adoption” and “AI Applications Serving Cybersecurity Teams.”
AI Transformation Necessitates Risk Management
AI transformation necessitates risk management and security by design. Data protection and content analysis become table stakes as internal and threat actor-driven risk scales. Concerns like sensitive data exposure, shadow AI, compliance and policy violations, rogue AI instances, jailbreaking attempts, improved phishing efficacy, and lower barriers to entry for synthetic media development like deepfake and audiofakes must be addressed in modern cyber risk models for both operational continuity and data security purposes.
The first wave of securing the enterprise journey begins like this: holistic visibility into employee adoption and use, addressing identity authentication challenges and inadvertent data access within enterprise AI systems, and governing employee access to specialized apps and application access to employees.
At Trend Micro, we’ve invested over three decades in evolving content analysis and data protection through next-gen antivirus, data leak prevention, and anti-fraud mechanisms to provide the foundation for every evolution the enterprise — from desktop to LAN configurations, the internet and cloud/multi-cloud, and now mass AI adoption.
At the on-set of the latest AI wave, our team rapidly developed and deployed the industry’s first AI security prototype — the AI Gateway via the Trend Vision One platform, now generally available since May 2024. Because the Trend Vision One platform seamlessly integrates telemetry from the endpoint, email, server, network, cloud, and identity environment, IT operations and security teams can easily measure risk and control human and non-human identity access to AI services and AI models.
With a central platform in place, accelerating security outcomes is a critical concurrent step to ensure comprehensive protection against existing and increasingly sophisticated threats and support business continuity planning. Trend Micro has been investing heavily into generative and agentic AI deployments for cybersecurity teams.
Bringing Forward Industry-First “AI Mesh” for the SOC
It’s our responsibility to prepare and arm cyber defenders with the best technology to protect and respond to risk events and threat activity. Trend Micro has introduced the next generation of cyber risk management through significant investment in our analyst experience-informed AI mesh. The AI mesh represents a new paradigm in cybersecurity where AI agents and services have a common framework to communicate and accelerate response. Starting with our “Companion” assistant, the first broadly available generative AI cybersecurity instance for the SOC, delivered in 2022, and now innovating in goal-driven and proactive AI as part of our “AI SOC” and NGSIEM evolution.
Cybersecurity teams will gain from Trend the flexibility and customization that legacy SIEM providers and rigid EDR-only vendors failed to offer. Innovations in third-party schema-free data ingestion, multi-path predictive attack path management, financial risk modelling, intelligent automations across native and third-party telemetry, and industry pioneering compliance monitoring serve all cybersecurity functions from the L1 analyst, all the way up to the CISO and beyond.
As we outfit cybersecurity teams with integrated, powerful tools and continue to advance security measures, ensuring serious responsible AI practices is critical. Isolating customer instances, opting out of customer data for model tuning, anonymizing personal identifying information, adhering to safe deployment practices are examples of the long list of measures we take to ensure data privacy and safety.
Securing the AI Data Centre
At Trend, our formula for innovation — X= infrastructure changes + user behavior – threats — ensures we prioritize and turn our attention to what’s next. Where we’ve identified the next need in cyber is securing the evolution of the data center — the AI data center.
Generative AI models require immense computing power, data, and bandwidth, which are quickly exceeding the capacity of traditional data centers. As a result, many organizations are turning to next-generation AI data centers specifically designed to handle these massive volumes of data and high-demand workloads. These data centers are the foundation of AI applications, but they are subject to the same potential risks as other technologies.
Our partnership with NVIDIA represents our commitment and our investment in bleeding-edge security for the next wave of innovation. Trend Vision One integrates with NVIDIA inference microservice (NIM) to secure AI-powered private data centers. As new infrastructure changes and threat vectors arise in the AI space, Trend and NVIDIA will work together in lockstep to secure the enterprise environment.
Moving cybersecurity forward
My vision for staying ahead in the industry balances on the ability to anticipate change and respond rapidly — and deploy effective protection safely and consistently. Effective cybersecurity innovation is equally about protecting data and systems as it is about ensuring the operation of business processes. The fusion of AI and cybersecurity is a powerful influence — breaking down siloes and bringing disparate internal business functions closer together. By integrating cybersecurity with business continuity, we are enhancing the resilience of businesses around the world and make it possible to withstand and recover quickly from disruption.
This holistic approach guarantees that the organizations we protect operate securely and efficiently, reflecting our commitment to excellence in cybersecurity.