by Angela Guess

A new press release reports, “IBM Security today announced that global leaders in banking, healthcare, insurance, education and other key industries have joined the IBM Watson for Cyber Security beta program. Sun Life Financial, University of Rochester Medical Center, Avnet, SCANA Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, California Polytechnic State University, University of New Brunswick and Smarttech will be amongst 40 organizations testing Watson’s ability to assist in the battle against cybercrime. Today’s increasingly challenging security environment has created the need for more intelligence to identify and prioritize threats, which is in turn increasing the workload of security analysts with more alerts and anomalies to process than ever. Watson for Cyber Security uses intelligent technologies like machine learning and natural language processing, which can help security analysts make better, faster decisions from vast amounts of data.”

The release continues, “A recent study from the IBM Institute for Business Value shows that nearly 60 percent of security professionals believe emerging cognitive technologies will be a critical part of changing the tides in the war on cybercrime. ‘Customers are in the early stages of implementing cognitive security technologies,’ said Sandy Bird, Chief Technology Officer, IBM Security. ‘Our research suggests this adoption will increase three fold over the next three years, as tools like Watson for Cyber Security mature and become pervasive in security operations centers. Currently, only seven percent of security professionals claim to be using cognitive solutions’.”

The release adds, “Watson for Cyber Security takes advantage of IBM’s leading cognitive technology, which is being trained to understand the unique language of security. By applying intelligent technologies like machine learning and natural language processing, Watson can help security analysts make better decisions from structured data, as well as the massive amount of unstructured data that has been dark to an organization’s defenses until now.”

Read more at IBM.

Photo credit: IBM