The cybsersecurity industry has a basic problem. There will soon be too many attacks and not enough trained human beings to deal with them. In what IBM Corp.’s top executive proclaimed as the “man and machine” era, the company has placed its own bet on intelligent systems to fill the gap.

“The security industry has reached a perfect storm, because it’s well known that by 2020 there’ll be 1.2 million unfilled security professional roles,” said Mary O’Brien (pictured), vice president of development, IBM Security, at IBM, who described the important role that machine learning will be expected to play. “That is our tool and our new practice in the fight against cybercrime.”

O’Brien spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the IBM Think event in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the role of Watson in handling threat analysis and the importance of professional collaboration on a global basis. (* Disclosure below.)

Ingesting vast amounts of security data

As IBM’s artificial intelligence platform for business, Watson is designed to ingest vast quantities of unstructured data, including blogs and written texts of security information. Armed with this massive trove of knowledge, far in excess of what a human could master, the expectation is that Watson will be able to perform key security tasks more thoroughly to meet the rising digital threat.

“Watson in our cybersecurity space acts as an assistant to the security analyst,” O’Brien said. “We have taught Watson the language of cybersecurity.”

Yet, humans remain a vital part of the security equation, and collaborative initiatives are also expected to play a key role. To foster collaboration on a global basis, IBM has created X-Force Exchange, a threat intelligence sharing platform. It is a repository of security intelligence collected in near real-time.

“The cyber criminals share on the Dark Web … so it’s very important for us to share as well,” O’Brien said. “Any of our competitors or other security organizations or interested parties can create a piece of work describing a particular incident that they’re investigating.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE