News

AI Advances Propel Cloud Security Innovations

• By David Ramel
• 03/07/2024

Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) applications are revolutionizing enterprise operations, with cloud security emerging as a prime area for innovation. Market leaders such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure are at the forefront of integrating advanced AI into cloud services. A surge in AI-enhanced cloud security tools from third-party vendors was evident from a spate of recent releases.

Cloudflare, a specialist in connectivity cloud solutions, unveiled new products, including Firewall for AI. The firewall serves as a protective layer for Large Language Models, blocking abuses before they hit the models. It integrates with Cloudflare Workers AI platform and third-party infrastructure, managed through the Web Application Firewall control plane.

Another Cloudflare innovation, Defensive AI, personalizes security strategies by analyzing customer traffic patterns. Cloudflare also focuses on API protection, email security, and insider threat mitigation through a Zero Trust approach.

The company also introduced an AI Assistant. This tool simplifies security event analysis, allowing users to use natural language queries to identify anomalies and potential threats. It can be used to:

• Identify the source of a spike in attack traffic by asking: "Compare attack traffic between US and UK"
• Identify root cause of 5xx errors by asking: "Compare origin and edge 5xx errors"
• See which browsers are most commonly used by your users by asking: "Compare traffic across major web browsers"
• For an ecommerce site, understand what percentage of users visit vs add items to their shopping cart by asking: "Compare traffic between /api/login and /api/basket"
• Identify bot attacks against your ecommerce site by asking: "Show requests to /api/basket with a bot score less than 20"
• Identify the HTTP versions used by clients by asking: "Compare traffic by each HTTP version"
• Identify unwanted automated traffic to specific endpoints by asking: "Show POST requests to /admin with a Bot Score over 30"

Sentra, a cloud-native data security firm, announced the Sentra Jagger, which is designed to enhance the company's Data Security Posture Management and Data Detection and Response platforms with real-time threat insights and extends to audit, compliance, and privacy governance. Sentra Jagger offers intuitive dashboards and AI-guided remediation, emphasizing incident response and security management integration.

In addition to real-time security insights, AI-assisted remediation guidelines, streamlined workflows and an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard, it also offers:

• Simplified interpretation of intricate security queries, offering clear and concise explanations in plain language to empower users across different levels of expertise to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions with confidence.
• Enhanced incident response capabilities that provide users with actionable steps to identify and remediate to streamline the incident response process while minimizing downtime, reducing damage, and quickly restoring normal operations.
• Integration with existing tools for a unified security management experience to present a holistic view of the organization's data security posture.

NetApp, which specializes in intelligent data infrastructure, announced a long list of cyber-resiliency updates, including the ONTAP Autonomous Ransomware Protection with Artificial Intelligence. The public preview of NetApp BlueXP Ransomware Protection and the general availability of NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery were also announced, alongside updates to SnapCenter 5.0 for ransomware protection of applications. And NetApp's Keystone Ransomware Recovery Guarantee promises recovery of snapshot data in the event of an attack, setting a new industry standard for precision and recall.

These announcements, all within the last day, highlight the dynamic nature of AI-powered cloud security. More developments are anticipated as the field continues to expand rapidly.