AI for Security

While AI has created a new attack surface that requires defenses in the form of guardrails, governance, model and data protection, and ways to protect and control agents, there is a bigger and ultimately more important segment of AI Security vendors. Just as AI is upending most of the world — from medical research to material science, legal, knowledge management, search, and automation — it is being applied to security too. Most of the new vendors here have arisen to apply AI to practically every category of cybersecurity including SOC Automation. Identity, Vulnerability Management, Penetration Testing and Red Teaming, Deepfake Defense, and Application Security. Each of these are covered in the chapters to follow.

In this chapter we cover the smaller categories of cybersecurity for which there are new AI vendors. In Chapter 15 we introduce the vendors that have unique approaches to improving cybersecurity for which there is no category yet.

Compliance

In an earlier chapter we covered the AI Governance space, driven by new AI regulations and the need to discover, monitor and control the use of AI. But there is a much bigger role for AI to play in automating governance, risk and compliance across the entire organization. That is, to do all of the work associated with asset discovery and classification, documentation, risk management, and compliance reporting. There are 577 GRC vendors uncovered by IT-Harvest’s research and monitored in the Dashboard. GRC has represented the biggest category of cybersecurity vendors for several years, a sign that the 30-year-old cybersecurity industry is maturing as regulations abound and organizations seek to impose security controls.

The USA is home to 325 GRC vendors, while the UK and Israel host 51 and 27, respectively.

Here are the companies targeting compliance with AI tools.