The modernization of the public sector represents a crucial step towards a more effective and efficient Public Administration. According to the Spain Digital plan, by 2025 it is expected that 50% of public services will be available through mobile applications, simplifying and personalizing the interaction of citizens and businesses with government entities.
However, as this progresses, cyberattacks continue to grow in both number and sophistication, and government agencies struggle to keep up with the constantly evolving threat landscape. This is further exacerbated by the fact that a significant portion of their IT budgets are allocated to maintaining outdated legacy systems. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and observability are proving to be essential in addressing this issue. By combining AI and observability, government agencies can create smarter and more responsive systems that are better equipped to face today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.
Dynatrace (NYSE: DT), a leader in unified observability and security, has conducted an analysis of the current situation to understand how the combination of AI and observability helps protect government networks against emerging threats:
Security Based on Rules in an Era of Rapid Change
A fundamental limitation lies at the heart of most traditional security solutions: many are rule-based, making them suitable for defending against anticipated risks, but not against new and unexpected risks. The traditional approach is entirely inadequate for modern systems.
Current applications are cloud-native, based on microservices, and extend to both the cloud and on-premises servers. Additionally, they are constantly modified and scaled up and down as needs change. The scale, complexity, and dynamism of these systems are why so many government agencies struggle to develop total visibility into them.
The complexity of modern systems, combined with the almost constant threat of new attacks, poses a threat too serious to ignore. Government agencies without a comprehensive understanding of their systems cannot prevent potential attacks and respond to real ones. Simply put, organizations do not know what they do not know. They do not know where vulnerabilities begin, what issues exist, how to resolve them, or how to prevent them from recurring in the future.
The Convergence of AI and Observability
This brings us to causal AI and observability, two technologies that, when combined, allow government agencies to proactively identify potential vulnerabilities and respond to threats in real-time.
Observability is the ability to see and measure the current state of a system based on the data it generates, which typically includes logs, metrics, traces, end-user experiences, and context in cloud, multicloud, and hybrid environments. In complex and distributed cloud-native environments, observability is powerful, as it shows teams exactly when problems occur and how to proactively resolve them. There are no more unknown unknowns. But observability is even more powerful when combined with Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). By using AIOps to monitor events across the system, teams can automate a variety of common security processes, including application monitoring, threat intelligence analysis, and security incident response. It is a particularly powerful approach when teams use it, for example, to automatically identify security issue patterns (such as unusual data flows) or find the root causes of problems.
Furthermore, through AIOps platforms, teams can quickly assess the impact of new system and application updates, helping them prevent and resolve issues before end-users notice them. This allows them to innovate more quickly while ensuring maximum service availability—both crucial for essential government agencies.
Responding to Zero-Day Threats
In December 2021, when security researchers had just discovered Log4Shell, companies that leveraged the power of AI and observability platforms were able to discover and assess the risk of each Log4Shell instance, prioritizing and remediating their vulnerabilities within minutes. Organizations that had not adopted AI and observability tools struggled to identify where their vulnerabilities lay, losing valuable time and exposing themselves to greater risks.
By using application security modules that enable agencies to safeguard applications at runtime for automatic and continuous protection, you get the best of both worlds: applications running at peak performance without vulnerabilities, made possible by highly scalable application security solutions. Beyond Log4Shell, agencies need to leverage technology that provides observability, intelligence, and complete agility to quickly and efficiently address and prioritize vulnerabilities.
New Approaches for a New Era of Threats
As more agencies seek to modernize their systems, these AIOps technologies will help ensure they do so correctly. The result: systems are more secure, more responsive, and better equipped to ensure government data remains immune.
That security is crucial nowadays. At a time of declining trust in governments, keeping citizens’ data secure offers agencies a significant opportunity to reinforce trust and credibility among the people they serve.