In a time of ‘transformation and automation’ where robots could take our jobs, there is still room for the human to keep the robots sane, said BlackBerry CEO.
Speaking at the BlackBerry Security Summit in London, BlackBerry CEO John Chen focused on the growth of cybercrime and claimed that the cost of attacks will increase from the 2016 numbers of $400 billion, to $6 trillion by 2021; while the cybersecurity spend will increase from $80 billion to $1 trillion, citing research by Cybersecurity Ventures.
Talking about the growth of BlackBerry, Chen said that in enhancing security, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) were part of a new movement, and there were people working on this in universities it works with and within its own research departments. BlackBerry, he said, “continues to maintain to know how technology works”.
Speaking to Infosecurity, Chen said that this is an area of expansion as analytics is not something any technology company could avoid. “If anyone tells you they are not interested in or working on analytics then that is basically nonsense”.
Chen continued: “The machine has progressed to the point where it can do everything that the human can do, and some more. So analytics is what the point is now, and the driver of analytics will create opportunities in the AI world, into the machine learning world, and into the predictability world.
“So if you are like us in the security business, you have to have predictability, and forward looking machine learning has to be part of the equation as today’s security is very much a reactive and pattern-driven technology. We need to be more predictive...and there has to be companies focused on machine learning technology.”
Also with a strong focus on IoT, Chen said security is not about a magic pill that will solve things, and companies need a cybersecurity process and mindset that is enterprise and company-wide, and not department by department.