Open-Source Cybersecurity Platforms Boost AI Readiness

This article is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent e-book,“How Artificial Intelligence Combats Fraud and Cyberattacks.” Download the full e-book here.

From the rise of ransomware attacks to large-scale data breaches, cybersecurity (or lack thereof) is dominating government technology conversations. Threats and malicious actors, both internal and external, have the ability to outmaneuver traditional cybersecurity forces, leaving government agencies susceptible to attack.

While time and financial constraints still weigh heavily on government resources, making the switch to a holistic, open-source approach to cybersecurity can prepare an agency to adapt to the evolving threat landscape more quickly and with greater effect.

To learn more about this approach, GovLoop spoke with Chief Technology Officer Marcus Waineo and Product Manager for Cybersecurity Simon Elliston Ball of Cloudera, a cloud-based data management enterprise.

“We want to help government agencies enhance their thinking about cybersecurity as more than a product-based solution,” Waineo said. “Cloudera provides a platform that allows you to integrate and optimize the existing tools that you’re familiar with into a more agile platform that enables advanced capabilities like machine learning to be applied to the problem.”

Elliston Ball explained that the Cloudera Cybersecurity Platform’s open-source and holistic approach to cybersecurity consists of pulling together all of the existing tools into a single platform to combine existing data and resources for increased effectiveness.

“There’s huge value in just the combination of data that a common platform provides,” he said. “Many of the people who are starting out get a surprising amount of value and insight from the relatively simple end of the data engineering side, before they even get on to the AI [artificial intelligence] and machine learning [ML].”

AI and ML tools are only as good as the data they’re based on. Before an agency can integrate those technologies into its cybersecurity platform, it’s important to consolidate, rationalize and cleanse existing data. It’s even better when the agency finds a platform to assist in aggregating the existing systems.

Open-source cybersecurity platforms are built on trust and transparency from a broad base of experienced resources from multiple industries and disciplines. This provides a more comprehensive and reliable infrastructure upon which to build a more agile cyber solution. Bad actors share intelligence data within their own circles, but with limited input and data sources.

By leveraging the same techniques for good, and with the added advantage of broader and more complete data sets available to the Cybersecurity Operations Center (SOC), Cloudera provides a safeguarded community of trust for government agencies to do the same. The Cloudera platform delivers the performance, scalability and reliability needed for agencies to efficiently organize and manage big datasets and advanced analytics more effectively.

With this platform, data scientists can safely and swiftly deploy AI and ML cybersecurity models with greater effect by bringing their tools directly to the data. Holistic, open-source data management removes analytic silos to drive more value from the data an agency already has.

To find out more about how AI and ML can improve cybersecurity, download GovLoop’s recent e-book, “How Artificial Intelligence Combats Fraud and Cyberattacks,” here.