Human-Machine Fusion Seen as Key to Cyber Defense

They may sometimes be uncomfortable bedfellows, but using the skills of both man and machine can be a powerful combination for firms looking to safeguard their businesses from cyberattack and other risks.

In addition, experts say, more nuanced use of data can plug some gaps in defenses that might otherwise require increasingly rare, and expensive, domain expertise.

Louis Rosato, director, investment operations, global business strategy, and relationship management at BlackRock, said ensuring IT failures do not happen is not just a job for technologists, it’s collaborative work between departments and also between humans and technology.

“We do continual risk assessments and run post-mortems on what broke down. What we also do is to use our technology to build better systems,” Rosato said. “We use our systems to build out additional functionality and to do this we put together the business team and the development team so that they’re not working in silos and build out the system that is really needed.”

Andrew Retrum, managing director at Protiviti, said firms should also look at using emerging technologies, like cloud and advanced data analytics, to gain a better understanding of risk.

“Companies could take advantage of the proliferation of data and use it to inform risk assumptions,” Retrum said. “What I think companies can look at is to plug into their data strategies the need to use their operational data to track and trend potential failures or cybersecurity concerns. If it’s already part of their data gathering then you don’t need deep security skill sets to find and analyze these. It can be made available through dashboards for example.”

He added the cloud offers a faster way to apply patches on the fly but most companies neglect to use the technology in that way. Both were speaking at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Operations Conference, held in Boca Raton, Fla. on May 9.

Rosato, Retrum and other panelists underscored how important it is that companies don’t just monitor risks but rather be proactive and look at trends in activities in its systems to better understand where problem areas are.