To understand why customers are turning to generative AI solutions like Microsoft Security Copilot, we need to look at the evolving cyberthreat landscape. Organizations are experiencing a surge in cyberattacks while also grappling with a global shortage of security talent. Over the past year, Microsoft has observed a significant increase in password attacks, now exceeding 4,000 per second. Additionally, if an organization falls victim to a phishing attack, attackers can access private data in just 72 minutes. Coupled with a global shortage of 3.4 million skilled cybersecurity experts, many organizations feel vulnerable and under-protected.
Generative AI: A Game Changer in Cybersecurity
To enhance safety and security, we must augment the efforts of our skilled security professionals. While human ingenuity and expertise are irreplaceable, technology can expand the capabilities of security teams with the rapid processing speeds, pattern recognition, and continuous improvements offered by generative AI. By detecting hidden patterns and providing informed responses at machine speed, generative AI helps us regain an advantage against cybercriminals. AI offers near real-time visibility and context for potential threats, aiding in faster investigation and mitigation. Solutions incorporating generative AI enable teams to be more effective and efficient, using natural language prompts instead of complex queries, and fostering easier collaboration with shared skills. Early preview customers of Microsoft Security Copilot have seen these benefits firsthand.
Early Customers Report Time Savings with Microsoft Security Copilot
Greg Peterson, Senior Director of Security, Technology, and Operations at Avanade, discusses the challenges his organization faces and how Microsoft Security Copilot helps by empowering senior analysts, junior analysts, and even interns to stay ahead of potential security threats.
“For senior analysts, Security Copilot might offer a new perspective on a problem. For junior analysts, it bridges the skills gap, especially as we develop more curated prompt playbooks and learn to use these tools,” Peterson explained.
Beyond generative AI, our comprehensive security, identity, compliance, and privacy solutions cover more cyberthreat vectors and deliver greater value with a coordinated, comprehensive customer experience across the digital estate. By embracing generative AI and simplifying complex toolsets, we help organizations gain an edge against cyberattackers and allow them to refocus security resources on critical business tasks, like innovation. In our preview of Microsoft Security Copilot, customers reported saving up to 40% of their security analysts’ time on foundational tasks like investigation and response, threat hunting, and threat intelligence assessments. For more mundane tasks like preparing reports or troubleshooting minor issues, Security Copilot delivered efficiency gains of up to 60%. The most promising aspect of our early research is not just the numbers, but what customers can achieve with these efficiency gains and time savings.
Upskilling with Security Copilot: Empowering Junior Security Analysts
Our preview research indicates that Security Copilot can enable junior security analysts, including Tier 1 and 2 team members, to handle tasks previously reserved for Tier 3 and 4 professionals. To test this, we asked our own Microsoft security operations center (SOC) analysts to evaluate Security Copilot’s output on tasks like incident summarization, script analysis, incident reporting, query assistance, and guided response. The results were impressive: experienced practitioners equated Security Copilot’s outputs to those of mid- to expert-level human analysts, particularly for tasks such as incident summarization, script analysis, and query assistance. This means any analyst can use natural language prompts to perform tasks they may not have much experience with, and Security Copilot’s outputs will help them achieve the right results immediately and develop critical skills for long-term use. With Security Copilot, your team can accomplish much more with existing resources.
The Impact of Security Copilot on Your Organization
Microsoft Security Copilot is more than just an AI-powered, large language model integrated with your security technology. It builds on the latest innovations in large language models and leverages Microsoft’s security expertise, global threat intelligence, and technologies to deliver significant efficiency gains for vital security use cases. When you submit a prompt, Security Copilot enhances it with security-specific insights from deep Microsoft Security knowledge and continuous learning. Your prompt is enriched with the end-to-end Microsoft Security product portfolio and fresh threat intelligence informed by Microsoft’s 65 trillion signals and human intelligence. Finally, it translates the response according to your prompt instructions, providing text or code that helps you understand the full context of an incident, its impact, and the next steps for remediation and defense hardening.
Security Copilot serves as an AI assistant for daily operations in security and IT, helping organizations:
- Outpace adversaries: Security Copilot helps analysts respond to and remediate incidents faster, allowing them to focus on proactive initiatives like implementing Zero Trust principles.
- Strengthen team expertise: Security Copilot assists junior security analysts in completing more complex tasks with skills like natural language to Kusto Query Language (KQL) translation and malicious script analysis.
- Simplify the complex: Analysts can ask questions in English, and Security Copilot understands the context, sets the plan in motion, and writes the script, saving time and exposing junior analysts to more complex skills.
- Catch what others miss: Using generative AI to analyze data from multiple sources, including Microsoft Security products and threat intelligence, Security Copilot helps analysts catch what they might otherwise miss.
- Cut through the noise: Security Copilot synthesizes data and detects important signals better than ever, allowing security and IT professionals to access, summarize, and act on insights faster.
- Broaden the hiring pool: With its upskilling potential, Security Copilot enables Tier 1 analysts to complete more complex tasks, allowing organizations to recruit and develop talent from a broader, more diverse pool.
