Quick Heal Technologies is one of the leading IT security solutions companies. Over a span of 25 years the company's R&D has focused on computer and network security solutions. The current portfolio of cloud-based security and advanced machine learning enabled solutions stop threats, attacks and malicious traffic before it strikes.

Though the famous British socialist Audrey Farrell said these words in the context of social activism and politics, they apply just as well to modern-day enterprise security. Businesses need to learn from past mistakes, while strengthening the current security robustness and enhancing their readiness for the future.

Why? Because the rapid evolution of the threat landscape is threatening all aspects of enterprise operations. Every business decision today is governed by data. We give others access to our privacy with every click. Networks are becoming increasingly porous, even as interconnectivity continues to grow exponentially through the adoption of digital tools and a BYOD work culture.

All of this puts businesses at a greater cybersecurity risk than they have ever been. In H2 2018, Seqrite, the enterprise arm of Quick Heal Technologies, detected and blocked over 50 million cyber-threats with Cryptojacking and Ransomware contributing 15000 and 2000 hits on a daily basis.

Threats and vulnerabilities that led to these breaches seem glaringly obvious in hindsight. But

what if there was a way to proactively identify these threats? This is exactly where the concept of predictive analytics steps into the picture to strengthen cybersecurity readiness for enterprises.

Predictive Analytics: What is it, and How it is Reinventing Enterprise Security
As the name suggests, predictive analytics is essentially a coming together of various cutting-edge technologies. It combines AI’s massive computation power with machine learning algorithms, data mining and analytics, and predictive modelling to proactively identify trends and developments, as per customisable parameters.

In the context of cybersecurity, this translates into the ability to collect and analyse huge volumes of data in order to gain key insights in the global threat landscape, such as attack patterns and trends.

How does this help modern-day enterprises? To begin with, unlike traditional security measures which identify threats through static signatures, predictive analytics-led security solutions allow organizations to initiate proactive threat hunting. By doing so, enterprise can anticipate relevant threat vectors and enhance the security profiles of their IT infrastructures to patch any existing vulnerabilities that might otherwise be exploited. This is of singular importance in today’s increasingly BYOD-led workspaces.

Moreover, such solutions can actually self-learn to iteratively become better over time, providing more accurate insights as they process more data. They also have the capability to continually monitor all activity and information flow across the entire IT stack. This allows anomalies and breaches to be detected in real-time, leading to much faster response and remediation of prospective threats and drastically brings down the impact that a breach might have on the organization’s business operations.

Predictive analytics can also automate much of the workload typically managed by in-house security teams, such as collecting, collating, and compiling the raw data from across the entire enterprise IT stack. This leaves IT managers freer to pursue more value-added business objectives, as well as to make strategic security-oriented interventions wherever necessary.

The Way Forward
Given the benefits that it delivers, it would not be an exaggeration to say that predictive analytics is rapidly becoming a must-have tool in the larger enterprise cybersecurity approach. It enables organizations to take greater control of their own security profiles and helps them become more efficient at safeguarding their critical enterprise resources and data. With the global threat landscape evolving at an alarmingly unprecedented pace, predictive analytics holds the key to redefining cybersecurity as we know it. Businesses must acknowledge this shift in existing paradigms – and equip themselves with the tools that will protect them from ever-evolving threats within the cyberspace.