How AI Impacts Cloud Security

AI and cloud security

The massive rise of GenAI tools in the last year has put AI at the center of the tech industry and public consciousness. AI technology has significantly contributed to the tech sector across various domains, but especially in cloud security. The cloud security market is growing exponentially, and AI capabilities are now a decisive factor when companies choose a cloud security solution.

To be fair, securing AI against a growing array of threats is also a challenge. Since AI systems process and analyze vast amounts of data, including sensitive or proprietary information, they become highly attractive targets for attackers. For example, adversaries can exploit weaknesses in AI models or tamper with training data. Cloud-based AI is particularly vulnerable to attacks that target its distributed and scalable nature. In the end, what’s needed is cloud security that leverages the best of AI while providing robust encryption and continuous monitoring.

In this article, we’ll examine how AI technology impacts multiple areas of cloud security. We’ll also discuss CrowdStrike and its contributions to leading AI-native security solutions and tools.

AI-powered threat detection and response

Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) further enhances security in cloud environments by using AI-native capabilities to hunt for threats and track lateral movement across workloads. This AI-driven approach enables real-time detection of cloud-specific risks, such as unauthorized access and configuration changes, while automating responses to mitigate threats quickly and reduce manual intervention.

Automated incident response can include blocking malicious IP addresses and upgrading vulnerable software. Enhanced by AI capabilities, a security team significantly reduces the time required for response while also relieving analysts of the burden of constant context switching.

AI-powered indicators of attack (IOAs)

Indicators of Attack (IOAs) are designed to preemptively identify suspicious activity by analyzing anomalous behavior patterns. By analyzing user behavior, network activity, and system configurations, IOAs can alert the security team to potential attacks, allowing them to intervene before a breach occurs.

AI is especially beneficial here, as it can significantly amplify the accuracy and speed of response. AI has demonstrated resounding capabilities with pattern recognition tasks, especially in quickly analyzing and processing behavioral data crucial for IOAs. Additionally, AI's powerful learning capabilities enable it to continuously improve, stay current and predict the latest techniques developed by malicious actors, bolstering the identification and classification of IOAs.

AI-powered behavioral analysis and UEBA

User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) is a cybersecurity technique that analyzes user activity for irregular patterns indicative of malicious behavior. AI-powered UEBA systems are trained on large sets of aggregated and anonymized user behavior data to learn new patterns, making them able to identify the threat level of an anomaly with a high degree of precision by rapidly analyzing events. 

AI-powered UEBA is highly efficient at detecting compromised credentials. This is done by analyzing suspicious login patterns, identifying anomalies from expected user behavior, and cross-referencing against known data breach sources. 

UEBA provides a broader, comprehensive approach to system security with its ability to detect many security threats, such as insider attacks, compromised accounts, and advanced persistent threats. CrowdStrike Falcon Identity Protection utilizes UEBA to distinguish between normal user behavior and anomalies, triggering automated responses if a threat is identified.

AI-driven compliance and auditing

Automated compliance checks are a core AI-driven feature, continuously scanning cloud environments for alignment with regulatory frameworks, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2. This automated scanning ensures that cloud configurations remain compliant by proactively flagging policy violations and non-compliant configurations in real time, allowing teams to address issues before they escalate.

AI can also be used with regulation-specific rule updates by automatically incorporating changes in compliance requirements as they occur. This enables organizations to maintain consistent adherence, staying up-to-date with evolving regulations without manual reconfiguration. Additionally, AI-driven report generation simplifies the auditing process, producing comprehensive compliance reports that reduce human error and make documentation easier for audit trails.

By automating these aspects of regulatory compliance—such as checks, scans, and updates—AI allows companies to focus more resources on strategic initiatives. Auditing is even more arduous than regulatory compliance, as it can be a never-ending data analysis and storage process. However, AI-driven auditing increases accuracy by relieving staff of tedious, repetitive work that is prone to human error while significantly increasing speed, ultimately resulting in lower costs. 

Cloud security and safeguarding enterprise AI

As organizations embed AI into their operations, protecting AI models and data within cloud environments has become essential. CDR is crucial here, offering real-time monitoring and AI-enhanced detection to prevent unauthorized access and tampering.

Protecting AI data integrity and confidentiality

AI models are often built on sensitive or proprietary data, making data integrity and confidentiality paramount. In addition, these models are vulnerable to attacks like data poisoning, where malicious inputs aim to corrupt model outputs.

CDR solutions help safeguard AI models and data by continuously monitoring for unusual data access or activity, such as unexpected file transfers or changes to data permissions. AI-powered user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) can track anomalous activity in real time, alerting teams to potential threats that could compromise AI data. In this way, today’s organizations are increasingly using AI to secure AI.

Managing compliance and reducing risk

With compliance increasingly covering AI-related data, cybersecurity platforms with CDR provide continuous compliance checks, flagging misconfigurations and maintaining audit trails. This helps organizations protect sensitive AI data and meet regulatory standards, safeguarding AI assets as part of a comprehensive security strategy.

Scalability and efficiency of AI in cloud security

The modern cloud threat landscape is marked by sophisticated adversaries seeking to exploit the dynamic, distributed nature of cloud environments. Traditional security tools rely on static, rule-based detections that struggle to keep up with cloud-conscious attackers and complex, cross-domain threats. These tools are prone to missing subtle breaches across cloud workloads or generating excessive false positives, leading to alert fatigue and reduced efficiency for security teams.

The new generation of solutions must use advanced analytical processing and competently handle vast quantities of data efficiently. AI-powered tools effortlessly scale to manage load spikes while maintaining robust defense with meticulous analysis and sustained precision.

Enterprise systems generate gigabytes—even terabytes—of log data in the cloud every single day. Without the aid of AI, analyzing such vast seas of data and producing meaningful information from them would be practically impossible. Meanwhile, AI-powered security tools, such as CrowdStrike’s Next-Gen SIEM, can ingest and analyze up to one petabyte of security log data per day. 

Conclusion

Machine learning and cybersecurity-based AI tools have quietly transformed the cybersecurity industry, creating tremendous value and helping secure cloud environments. As global cloud breaches increase every year, AI will play increasingly crucial roles in identifying sophisticated attack patterns. It will also relieve security analysts of the tremendous burdens of their daily tasks and help bridge the overall shortage of experts in this area.

CrowdStrike has been a leader in this area for many years through the incorporation of cutting-edge AI technologies in its cybersecurity offerings. By providing organizations with top-tier cybersecurity tools, CrowdStrike aligns its success to the success of organizations that rely on robust digital protection to safeguard their assets and operations.