The telecommunications sector is going through a period of massive change, with a significant shift toward edge computing. Simultaneously, ransomware is becoming an increasingly complicated threat.

Since 2019, ransomware has grown by 466% and is being used as a precursor to physical war, as seen in the Russia conflict in Ukraine, according to a report released by Ivanti Software Inc. With ransomware becoming a household word, it’s important to give all organizations full visibility of their environments — especially given the reported frequency of cyberattacks today, according to David Shepherd (pictured, left), global vice president of sales engineering at Ivanti.

“We want to embrace the edge, and that is the way we’re going to move,” he said. “But customers are mindful of the complexity that’s involved in that. And that, lends thought to how are we going to deal with those complexities.”

Shepherd and Srinivas Mukkamala (right), chief product officer at Ivanti, spoke with industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin earlier this year, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the company’s proposed solutions to those complexities and the role of artificial intelligence in those solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Dealing with complicated environments

Telecom companies are used to dealing with perimeter-based networks, which are known to the users. But today, those perimeters have extended to the home, as work is often done outside of the office. It means that the definition of a perimeter must change, as one’s browser is the new perimeter. What we have seen is horizontal-based security, but what we haven’t seen is verticalization, especially in mobile, according to Mukkamala.

“You hear a little bit about automobile, you hear a little bit about healthcare, but what we haven’t seen is what about food sector? What about the frontline in food?” he said. “What about supply chain? What security are we really doing?”

Ransomware has evolved to use multiple vulnerabilities rather than just being a one-trick pony. How might AI fit into all of this? Attackers will undoubtedly use AI, but companies will also be using AI to defend. In the future, everyone is going to need to utilize generative AI as a sort of human assistant — though it will need to be trained on the latest data, according to Mukkamala.

“For any AI and ML method, you’ve got to look at three things,” he said. “It’s your data, it’s your domain expertise, who is training it, and your data model. In ChatGPT, it’s older data. It’s biased to the people that trained it. The data model is it’s going to spit out what it’s trained on. That’s a precursor of any GPT.”

With all this in mind, and as organizations look for better ways of dealing with complicated environments, Ivanti points to Ivanti Neurons, a hyperautomation platform that leverages AI and ML to provide real-time intelligence across assets. That’s important given a global shift to hybrid work and an explosive growth of remote endpoints, data and workers, according to Shepherd.

“With our Neurons platform … that’s what we want to give the customers all the time, which is the real-time snapshot so they can make a priority or a decision based on what the information is telling them,” he said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with David Shepherd and Srinivas Mukkamala:

(* Disclosure: Ivanti Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Ivanti nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE