What company leaders need to know about creating safe bases in the age of Intelligence
The present danger and technology landscape of AI is evolving quickly, becoming increasingly difficult – and dangerous.
Just as leading companies are adopting AI to shape their future for the better, with more than 85 % of the Fortune 500 using Microsoft AI solutions, cybercriminals of all kinds are looking to take advantage of AI for more nefarious means – mounting more numerous and varied attacks, faster and more efficiently ( are now happening every day, from deepfakes to spear phishing ).
People around the world, in every industry, from knowledge employees to frontline workers– are more portable and technologically connected than ever. This increases efficiency and freedom, but more equipment being used in more areas beyond the workplace means people are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks too.
In this setting, safety is a group sport, and the table is mainly responsible for risk management. As such, it is good for leaders to have an knowing – at a proper level – of how their company can and should use AI to support itself, matching the frequency and approach of attackers.
As part of the response to the modern threat landscape, Microsoft launched the ( SFI ) – a multiyear commitment to evolve the way products and services are designed, built, tested and operated to achieve the highest possible standards for security. This involves being protected by design, by default, with stable businesses.
The goal of the SFI is also to assist businesses in becoming more resilient against virtual threats by providing tools and resources to enable organisations defend their digital assets and keep operating continuity. Given how complicated the current AI-enabled threat environment is and how complex enterprise data and technology infrastructure has become, AI and automation have themselves become important tools and resources every organisation needs to defend itself from.
Lay foundations that are secure by design
In the UK, more than 560, 000 new cyber threats are discovered daily. Attempting to adopt or build multiple piecemeal cloud and security solutions that are AI ready to mitigate these threats and work together seamlessly without leaving any gaps is incredibly difficult. Organisations are often better off adopting a single platform that’s already and always secure – with best of the breed AI security tools integrated as standard.
Customers continue to choose Azure as their cloud data platform for running their critical business applications, storing and analysing information and implementing AI solutions, because they understand how Microsoft’s security investment and expertise compares to their own. It’s more efficient and effective to inherit this level of security by design than to try and recreate it themselves.
Billions of pounds are invested in Microsoft’s security every year, and the company employs more than 34, 000 full-time security engineers. Microsoft also serves billions of customers globally, aggregating 78tn security data signals in 2024, across the cloud, devices, software tools and ecosystem of companies, partners and employees. These resources and this proactive threat intelligence are used to keep the Azure platform secure.
Azure is also secure by design because it’s built from the ground up with security as a foundational principle, woven into the platform’s architecture and development process. It follows a “zero trust” model, which means every time someone accesses company data, their right to access is verified based on user and device identity, among many other signals.
As , Security Solutions Leader for Microsoft UK says:” Azure is the platform – and foundation – for our customers ‘ own AI powered transformation. Secure foundations make for secure transformation. We apply AI technology and insights to make Azure the most trusted cloud platform in the world, to ensure that anything our customers build on it is also benefitting from AI-powered cybersecurity”.
” On top of this, we offer a layer of AI-powered defence tools, such as Security Copilot. Together, they combine to give defenders an asymmetric advantage over attackers – for arguably the first time in history”.
Moving from reactive to preventative, with security by default
In addition to delivering security by design, a platform-based approach that’s” secure by default” saves time and energy by supporting secure operations. Adopting a single AI-enabled platform makes it much easier to ensure – across the entire organisation and for all employees – security protections are switched on and enforced by default, require no extra effort, and aren’t optional.
Always-on security measures such as multi-factor authentication ( MFA ), data encryption, cloud network monitoring, detection, and self-healing can be automated to run 24/7 and prevent problems from happening in the first place.
Augmenting human skills to support secure operations
Demand for generative AI tools has been so high simply because of the sheer number of tasks, meetings and amount of information modern professionals have to handle day to day. It’s no different for security professionals. AI-enabled technology that augments their skills and experience to free them up to do more proactive, higher value work has become increasingly valuable – like , a generative AI assistant for daily operations that helps cyber defence employees find and analyse information and answer queries faster, or , a scalable, cloud-native security information and event management tool, that provides cyberthreat detection, investigation, response, and proactive hunting.
As these measures are optimised for and integrated with Azure, they also help employees spend less time fixing, firefighting and manually responding to incidents, which gives them more time to focus on secure operations – continuously improving security controls and monitoring to meet current and future threats.
Responsible AI is secure AI
To remain secure while AI technology continues to develop, both cloud platforms and AI tools must respect responsible development principles, including data protection. For example, with Azure OpenAI, your data is your data. Customers can develop and run AI applications with assured privacy, in whatever region or jurisdiction they require. Information is kept safe with all the built-in security features people expect from Azure, and data is never shared with or used to train other AI models.
This direction of travel will only continue to accelerate, as AI tools become more powerful, efficient, and widespread – which is why the risk of standing still or doing nothing rises every day.
Business leaders will benefit from a proactive approach and speaking to their chief security experts to understand what’s being done – and what they can do. By leveraging AI for more efficient, effective defence, organisations can be secure by design – and by default.
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