Maturity Curve for AI in Security – Chris Meenan, IBM

This is texturing TV. Hi everyone, welcome back to techstrunk TV, you know, as long as RSA was and there were 40,000 something people there. We couldn't interview them all but there was some really important people that we we wanted to try to catch up with but there's just only so many hours in the day.

My next guest was in RSA as well. and we didn't get a chance to meet their live, but I'm happy to say that we were able to schedule this on my first day back. So let me introduce you to Chris meaning.

And and Chris's vice president product management and strategy for IBM security and Chris. Welcome to Tech strong TV. Hey, I'm thanks very much for having me here today.

Super really excited about our shop here. I'm excited as well. You know before we jump into it.

I I brought up the whole RSA thing. I know you are out there. You want to I don't know 30 seconds share your impressions of RSA this year with our audience.

I'm well, I can just act RSI as properly back. I mean I felt there was a real Buzz there. Yeah place was packed lots and lots of meetings with customers and partners and analysts just a quite a buzz again really great to see the show floor alive as well.

A lot of good news stuff. I'm sure we'll start we'll get it talking about as well. So yeah just felt like there was a real energy, you know that it was back.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I actually came directly there from Amsterdam where I was in kubecon the week before Cloud native cart, and that was also sold out show 10,000 strong with the 2000 person waiting list and it had that same excitement that same energy so I I think You know in in-person shows the back people are happy to see learn and you know in spite of Doom and Gloom about economy and all these other things. It was in it was in full force.

Anyway, Chris, you know what? I mean VPS and IBM are not Guided variety VPS. I'd love to hear a little bit about your own Journey if it's okay.

Yeah sure. I mean like I'm a being a IBM for 13 years now. I came in at IBM by an acquisition of q1 labs.

Obviously richer company greater Q radar. Yeah, and I'm I was a technical product manager there a q1 labs and I've really just growing up with the Curie in our product and different Acquisitions. We've made over the years and in soar and network fret on analytics EDR Etc on all our threat intelligence.

So yeah, I I am a really technical guy. I love spending time or customers. I love spending time in our product making it work for our customers on really helping Drive The Innovation forward as well.

So yeah, I'm a I'm at home with the technical and analyst Community definitely. I love it. Excellent, and you know Chris before we jump into kind of the meat of what we want to talk about today.

Everyone's heard of IBM. And I think 90 plus percent of our audience is familiar with IBM security. But for instance, you're from the q1, you know, the q1 Sim kind of products.

There's there's the vulnerability pieces of it. There's endpoint IBM security is a multifaceted world of you know, kind of a I mean in my mind always a Soup To Nuts security practice including Consulting and everything else are used to be give us if you can to recap of what IBM security is today. Okay, cool.

Right. Well, there's four there's four man areas of quickly run through here. First of all, we have our sort of threat management set of offerings.

That's everything around the song sin sore EDR attack surface management threat intelligence everything and if everything everything around sort of Security operation Center, the second pillar we have is our data security business. That's where we're helping customers secure their data as they're moving into the hybrid Cloud. So that's everything from data Discovery and classification through to protection monitoring and malicious use and compliance.

Bird area is helping our customers protect their remote workers on consumers on their digital identities. So it's everything from access management MFA SSO governance through to multifacre event. Sorry through to priviley's identity management as well as some Consumer Fraud capabilities as well.

And then finally our services practice where we will help Implement manage and consult on our offerings and in our services offerings. We have very big ecosystem of Technology vendors as well. So we tend to mix and match the IBM technology with with third party Technologies from our partners.

Not saying I'm not sure yet. You know why that's it. That's a nice way of.

Organizing this I like it a lot right resonates. Well with customers and the kind of challenges that they have today so all about data identities and staring ahead of the threats. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean. Let me see. I know we did this is not rarest.

We're talking about response incident response. Yes, so we've definitely yeah. So with the technology component for instant response lives in our threat portfolio actually and our sore actually the soar technology we have in there.

We need that acquisition resilient back in 2017 2016. I was and that was actually much more of an IR based to the time in terms of hot and incident but I gather the team together go beyond the salt make sure the organization is is doing everything they can to mitigate this thing minimize the impact from you know from the from the media through to compliance and legal HR they all thing and then also in our services side we have like I I respond our instead of response Services where you know, we will power shoots, you know experts into you know, contain an erotic it reaches shoot down. America's Too Short a little hand and Global with each other Hmm, I get it.

All right, that gives us you know, what? That's the most complete picture of ivf's I've got I serve some purpose that was that was excellent. So Look Chris last week in San Francisco.

I don't think you could take three steps without tripping over someone talking about AI right or generative AI or GPT or machine learning and AI. I mean it was it was this year's zero trust. But yeah made her come back there for sure.

Yeah, I mean You know cutting it. Let's try to cut through. The hype if we can.

And look IBM's major player. You just laid out this whole. you know kind of grand organization of how you look at the security world.

Let's talk a little about is this real yet? Is it helping us? If so how if not when?

You're the expert you're you know, product management strategy. What are your thoughts Chris? Okay, if we just act take a bit of a step back as always like, you know, one of the things up Wings always try to do is understand it.

What's that? What are the different problems? We're seeing in the industry.

Like I is AI so can solve each each one of those because I think that's how you start like tying it back to some form of reality. So what what we're seeing right now is a bunch of challenges that the security industries always had a ride like having a ton of data not having enough skills or knowledge gaps, really? And having threats that are just like moving really really quickly and you know, so what was that?

Those are like pretty long, you know, as long as I've been in the security industry, they're being challenges. Now, I would have moved to cloud like they're being made even more cute because the security teams are just being given all of this new infrastructure new security tooling to secure these different Cloud platforms and SAS services and you know modernized application infrastructure as well as take care of the traditional stuff as well or by the way the perimeters disappearing there. So you've got to do a bunch of new stuff so effectively there's like it's straining everything that was there before like the knowledge Gap was getting eaten harder.

There's more data there's more tools. So there's more screens to visit. There's more Pieces of a puzzle to bring together on the threats are just getting faster and faster.

So like I really look upon the biggest challenge organization top today is just making their people scale and move more quickly, right? And that's what we really see AI is being like really helping with and you know certain things that I would say certain there's been ai's definitely helping in some areas of that right now, for example, you'll see AI that is able to for example, you know, automatically, you know, read Twitter feeds and look in the dark web and take information about scraps that have been written up on extract out information from those and make them more immediately usable by the security team, but that sort of AI is sort of it's there and working and I'm sort of goes on to recover because it's not it's not you know, it it just it's just in the background and works. The second piece is that you know, where we also see AI being used a lot is is helping the imagine you're getting all of these insights from lots of security tools like your EDR platform style and new things the cloud platforms telling you things and you know, Helping an anonymous make sense of all of those on which ones are most important.

So we have definitely in our portfolio got like AI that helps with that and helps sit through some of the some of the you know noise and and maybe associate things together that are most probably related to the same time. And again, like that's very effective kind of flies under the radar because it's not really being you know, it's just helping the analyst do their work more quickly. It's not really changing their workflow.

It's just helping them along the way and I think she thinks that's the best way I should work for it should be transparent. It should be helping but I think no what we're seeing with some of them you stuff like the generator of AI and Chuck GPT. I'm kind of engagements and not like the Nirvana of you know, it's Something's Happened tell me what to do and let me hit a button or even not let me hear the button.

Let me tell you where you go to go. I'm just going to fix it like that sort of stuff. I mean it's definitely starting to see little acorns of possibility because I charge you deep is amazing like it's amazing when you look at what it's actually doing but it comes with a lot of like, you know, it just comes a lot of trust issues.

How accurate is it is is the information real is a is it even understanding what it's saying and insecurity definitely one things we've seen with AI is like you have to gain a trust that the users unbelievably right, you know and if users don't trust the machine like they it they'll stop using it almost like, you know, it takes months to rebuild trust once you start losing it. So I think on the chat that that I will really really only a star here and it's very easy to make something look like really impressive but like in a high in a sock situation It can be very quickly sidelined because the security team lose confidence in it because it starts. I think I saw an interesting Twitter feed or virus total about some malware not being dangerous because it didn't produce puppies or something now, it's just completely it completely missed it hallucinating is the term.

So I think there's still some there's a lot to go there by so I think there's some In a nutshell there's some core components of AI that are there and machine learning AI machine learning are actually being used very effectively definitely certainly within our product portfolio and then other areas some of the years Buzzy stuff still got some way to go but really promising stuff. Yeah. so I don't disagree with what you said.

Don't disagree at all. I think what we're seeing right now, especially fresh off of ours saying Keep Calm before that is the real concrete capabilities that we've grown around ML and then you want to call it mlai fine. right over the last five ten years Are being like babies in the bath water?

Being cast out because people are saying look the generator of AI stuff yet has all kinds of promise. but it's not there yet. And so a lot of this stuff is hype and then you look at the AIML stuff and they it gets cast with that same paintbrush and it shouldn't It's different.

And yeah, absolutely. I'm afraid that we're gonna we're gonna throw out some babies with that bathwater around AIML people are gonna have less confidence in it. Well, let's You know if they're not buying it, you're not gonna sell it is kind.

I guess what I'm saying. Yeah, I mean I definitely well I yes I think there's always not risk and I think there's things certainly that we do within our portfolio and we just start going on second you in our suite with a bunch of stuff this stuff and better so I'm hoping that is the kids but some of the things that we did in the really help with this problem was like, you know, make sure it's really transparent really upping the trust level real focus on building trust with the users improving the transparency understanding explainability to the user about our certain things. We're concluded so they can unlike them feed that back.

So there's a level of you know, they can build up building your trust. Yeah, because it is super I mean we've actually been implemented a lot AI in our in our own Security operation centers are part of that fourth that I talk about but we actually have like about a thousand Global socks and we we actually use AI that same a In there for our own teams to use to share our customers and we see it. We see it's impactiveness.

But we are those same issues about that trust transparency that we work through there and I think some of this new AI has to go through that and certainly when we when we talk to customers about it. That's the number one issue actually. So there's a lot of excitement with you know, cisos and directors saying okay.

This is a really great way. I can like get my upscale my existing pain, but it's immediately stripped to like, where's the trust where's the transparency? Where's the explainability because I can't you know, this is these are serious business impacting issues.

This isn't producing a presentation by 10 minutes more quickly is understanding if there's a nation state threat actor in your environment, right very different thing different. There's a lot of Gravitas. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. So it's it's a it's a different bowl game that requires a different level of maturity. Yeah, trust transparency and explain ability.

You know, I I was talking to someone last week. That said basically like developers were using let's say the GPT to to generate code about 26% of the code. They're generating is usable they is used.

Which means 74% isn't? That's not good enough for security when you have nation state. Oh things on the line, right?

That's gonna let people sleep. Well at night. No exactly.

Yeah. I can imagine like the the board coming and saying imagine. Yeah.

Yeah. I might have we been as our environment infiltrator by this, you know, Fred. I love God part 25% I've been so yeah, it's not that's not going to work.

Not my help get the answer a bit more quickly for sure. Yeah, and I think that might be the path here the on-ramp where we use it to get to answers more quickly, but it doesn't do it by automagically itself, you know, because I'm in security myself 25 years, right? I remember we co-founded a company Boulder Colorado back in 2001 2002 and we were kind of Early in Market with when IDs was first moving to IPS.

So intrusion detection to intrusion prevention, then we came out with a vulnerability management solution that not only scanned but allowed you to remediate automatically if you so chose. And then we wanted the first thing what they called Knack network access control and consistently across all three products. There was that same wall we went ran into where especially in security.

We're very hesitant to automate stuff and let a machine make decisions that could impact right? Everybody's oh, I can't block that traffic. Maybe it's coming from my CEO or coming to my CEO or I I can't I can't apply that patch no matter how serious this vulnerability is because I got to see if it breaks something else.

It takes us 90 days to death. Right, or I I can't decide I'm not gonna let this laptop on the network because he doesn't have antivirus. He's infected.

He's whatever he doesn't meet policy because that might be a VIP person that you know, we have to give access to and you know, this is a common theme in security right? We're a little hesitant. To kind of you know, you got to take those keys out of our cold dead stiff fingers right before we're gonna let a machine do it without a human looking and I think we'll run it probably into the same thing here.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I've definitely seen some movement like and not direct. I mean I could even use our own IBM security team.

I mean they are they have a set of here entities that if anything happens meets like a certain checklist of behaviors, they get Court they get so they get them quarantined straight off about like immediately. Yeah. We said that wasn't happening four or five years ago no point.

I mean some of the improvements there are through things like better analytics better ml a better context as well to help drive. So these are some of the areas where Securities made a ton of progress I think but also trust exactly. Yeah, that's exactly so any new tech that comes in any new AI immediately goes into that.

I don't trust a bucket Hi, let me have a look about what it says. Let me try it for a period of time. Let me let me build that for us.

And that's the bet that I think were. Yeah, we're not in this new generative World. We're in that in that process and then you know, obviously what I'm thinking about from a portfolio respective is okay, when when is that, you know?

When can we compliment our existing AI with the new generative AI that were the trust level is at the right level for the security team to actually start, you know, trusting it. I'm being able to leverage it. So, I'm really I'm really excited about the chat that you don't get me wrong.

I don't mean to be the doubting Thomas. You know what you know what she here. I'm excited about it, too.

I think the promise here is is unbounded. Yeah, but I I think you know, this is just the way of things especially in Tech we go through these hype Cycles exact. I was just about to say this why you are in the way right into the child.

Just anxiety the hype the more of a let down we're gonna get yeah. What if I decides pretty high? Yeah, why us may as a product manager.

I always like try and tell my team our job is to make sure that profit to spare is super shallow Right comes up. It's quick. Yeah just comes up and then settled on really quickly and people get the value.

We don't end up in this massive for also despair. But yeah, so it's very exciting for sure early into some of it into these like I'm Foundation models which are behind llams and they're so we're starting weeping testing some of these things internally with our own security team as well. But again, it comes back to that thing, you know, there's a trust So transparency there is the explainability there an importantly is it actually making the security team go faster because ultimately that's what counts exact.

That's the only thing that matters. It's the only thing that matters in security Alexander. It's not going to be right very well.

I agree Chris. I promise you we'd be 15 minutes. I think we're way over 20 or it goes quick on here.

I apologize. You have to come back on we'll continue the conversation. But for now for people maybe want to get more information about all the great security offerings from IBM.

Where can they go? com/security exactly our marketing team? We've got right up.

Well, I might have been there once or twice myself. But okay. Hey Chris.

Thanks for being I guess today on Tech strung TV. Do let's not wait till next RSA to talk, right? That's not yeah notification whenever you'd like to chat about all things security to be our pleasure to have you here.

Thanks very much. Alan. Great talking to you.

Thank you Chris. Meaning Chris is Vice President product management and strategy for IBM security. We're going to take a break here on Tech strung TV.

We'll be right back in a moment.