Leveraging AI in 2024
Can you guess the technology buzz word of the year?
That’s right – Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is all we’ve been hearing about, drowning out everything else. Every vendor has announced their intentions with AI and how they plan to integrate that into their solutions, and the trend is not going to stop any time soon.
The reality is that AI has been in development for many years, and we’ve seen many pieces of this technology showing up in our daily lives. From our smartphones picking up our daily driving patterns to Alexa informing us about products we may be running out of, AI is a regular part of our day to day whether we recognize it or not. AI is certainly a useful tool, but it’s now gone from the periphery to the center stage.
As a leader in information technology, the main question that I’m trying to understand and communicate to our clients is how AI will actually impact our collective lives at work. For those of us serving in the IT sector, it will absolutely upend the way we do business today. But the benefits it will bring will also be staggering.
As we begin this new year, I want you to consider the types of solutions you are buying, the problems you are trying to solve, and how AI can make these better.
AI for Networking
The first thing you need to be considering is the platform. The choice you make here will determine how useful AI can be in the process. For example, are you buying dumb or smart devices? What software is running on them? Is this software tied into a larger AI framework so it can automate tasks, see trends, make recommendations, and even automatically fix issues for you? That’s the kind of investment you want to make.
Let’s look at some real-world examples.
Imagine you walk into work one day to find that your network is misbehaving. Some people can access their data, some can’t. It’s random, it doesn’t make any sense. In today’s world, you’d end up spending all day on this problem. You’d spend time troubleshooting it, only to find the problem moves around the network. You’d get vendor tech support involved, and they’d have you collect logs and do packet captures, consuming valuable time. You’d finally get to the end of the day and you’d reboot some equipment to see if that fixes the problem – and to your surprise and excitement, it does! It’s great that you got your problem fixed, but it took an entire day of frustration—that’s not ideal.
Soon though, similar situations will happen quite differently. You will have a network that has AI capabilities. Before your users even tell you there is a problem, your AI agent will have already notified you of the issue and asked if you want assistance troubleshooting this problem. You say yes of course, and it goes to work. Minutes later, your AI agent has reviewed all of the logs, looked at the traffic analysis, checked with the vendors bug website to confirm what bugs might be causing this, and then – and maybe most importantly – lets you know that you had this same problem a couple years ago and that a reboot of one specific device fixed the issue. You tell the AI to notify people of the impending reboot, and perform the action when approved by management. This resolves the issue. And best of all, the entire resolution happens within minutes, not hours or days as it sometimes would in a non-AI enabled environment.
AI for Cybersecurity
AI is also useful in augmenting your security tools. It’s impossible to monitor all of your tools and all of the data coming out of those tools on a 24/7 basis. AI agents will be able to constantly monitor your environment and then make recommendations for action, if necessary. AI doesn’t get tired, take breaks, or overlook minor anomalies. It can sift through colossal amounts of data, detect unusual patterns, and can even predict potential security breaches before they occur. This will significantly increase your ability to keep your environment secure while reducing the load on your IT team.
However, as we embrace AI for IT, we must also acknowledge its dual nature. While AI can greatly enhance our security measures, it can also be harnessed by malicious actors to launch more sophisticated and targeted attacks. Cybercriminals are not lagging behind in adopting AI for their ill purposes. AI can enable them to craft more convincing phishing emails, evade traditional security measures, and adapt their tactics in real-time to bypass defenses. This means that, if your organization doesn't have its own AI-powered security infrastructure, you risk falling behind in the ongoing arms race between cybercriminals and defenders.
At Telcion, we understand the critical role that AI plays the technology landscape, and we are here to assist you in harnessing AI to benefit you and your organization for the better. Our expertise and tailored solutions can help you stay ahead of the curve and ensure that your digital assets remain safe and secure in an AI-powered world.
We know AI is coming. The question you need to be considering is – do you have the platforms today that you can build on to leverage AI for your company? As always, Telcion is here to help you answer the questions you have about your IT environment. If you want to have a consultation with one of our experts, reach out to us and we can set up a no-pressure call to start the conversation.
This post was contributed by Lance Reid, our CEO. Lance has worked in the technology industry for over 25 years. He became a Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) in Collaboration in 2005 and has been serving on Cisco's SMB Advisory Board since 2013.
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