Network Performance | February 18, 2025
By Alex Rassey : Go-To-Market Strategist and Growth Leader
The Sooner the Better: AI-Powered Visibility Accelerates Threat Detection and IT Operations
We expect Artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up processes and drive down costs, and that seems to be what’s happening in cybersecurity. A recent survey found that 1 in 5 organizations now use AI in their cybersecurity practices, and their investments paid high dividends on multiple fronts – like faster threat detection, lower breach costs, and reduced strain on overworked SOC teams.
After a quick update on the role and value of AI, we’ll introduce a new generation of AI-powered network visibility and explain why applying AI earlier in the process helps to find threats faster and give defenders an even greater advantage.
AI-Powered Security Speeds Detection and Lowers the Cost of Breaches
Research conducted by the Ponemon Institute for the 19th annual IBM Cost of a Data Breach report showed profound implications for using AI to stack the deck in your security team’s favor. Important findings of the 2024 report show the potential for using AI to prevent, investigate, and shut down cyber threats faster.
Companies that use AI and automation extensively for security identified and contained breaches nearly 100 days faster than other organizations — a major bonus for lowering costs. Extensive use of AI also reduced average mean-time-to-identify (MTTI) by 33% and mean-time-to-contain (MTTC) breaches by 43% for prevention.
Extensive Use of AI in Cybersecurity Saves Nearly $2M Per Breach
The IBM survey also showed that extensive use of AI lowers the cost of breaches by nearly half. Organizations that reported using AI and automation extensively for security experienced average breach costs of $3.84 million while other victims saw breach costs surge to $5.72 million — a hefty added expense of $1.88 million per breach.
Faster Detection Avoids Analyst Burnout
AI equips security monitoring tools to process higher volumes of data faster so overworked security teams spend less time sifting through reems of alerts to find and respond to real threats. The time-savings frees skilled security professionals to investigate and shut down more legitimate threats and attacks and to proactively use analytics to predict where they’ll strike next.
As cyber risk continues to evolve, businesses need to find new and faster ways to use AI and machine learning (ML) to move beyond detection to automate response and continue to optimize operations at scale.
A New Era in Observability: Keysight AI Turns Packet Brokers into Insight Brokers
Adding AI earlier in the process of detecting threats and resolving performance issues accelerates and amplifies its value even further. Keysight’s addition of AI to its Vision network packet brokers (NPBs) transforms traditional NPBs into highly intelligent Insight Brokers that effectively help AI and visibility.
In this new era of AI-led visibility, enhanced Vision Insight Brokers apply AI to analyze and enrich data for real-time detection, investigation, and response to modern threats—before filtering data to monitoring tools. Insight Brokers feature enhanced memory and storage to process network traffic at machine speed and scale.
Flexible integration models streamline deployment
The new class of Vision Insight Brokers features two flexible options for leveraging best-in-class AI security and performance monitoring software from Keysight and its Technology Alliance Partners:
- Keysight’s integrated AI Stack software that applies AI earlier in the monitoring process. AI Stack provides anomaly detection, dynamic application signature identification, and predictive analytics to lighten the burden on monitoring tools. Keysight’s AI software also allows more processing to happen at the edge of the network, as well as in traditional data centers to optimize network and cloud utilization
- AppFusion third-party integrations speed deployment of multi-vendor visibility and monitoring infrastructures. AppFusion lets organizations integrate AI-led technology from Keysight Technology Alliance Partners to reduce hardware requirements and operations costs. Consolidating multiple servers and AI monitoring agents speeds deployment and streamlines centralized management of a next-generation visibility and monitoring infrastructure.
Initial AppFusion alliance partner integration include Forescout EyeInspect cybersecurity monitoring, Instrumentix xMetrics solutions for financial trade flow monitoring, and Nozomi Networks solutions for operational technology (OT) environments. Read more about AppFusion.
What is an ‘Insight Broker’?
An AI-driven Insight Broker is a memory- and storage-enhanced Vision network packet broker (NPB) that runs Keysight’s AI Stack software and integrates AI monitoring agents from Keysight alliance partners. Instead of just filtering out unwanted data and delivering the right network traffic to the right tools, AI Insight Brokers process data at the network edge—reducing the burden on tools and analysts’
Insight Brokers Fuse Visibility and Monitoring
AI’s greatest potential lies in bringing more things together faster, like we’re doing with partner technologies within the AppFusion Integration Program. AppFusion doesn’t just offload the work of processing data, it offloads efforts to integrate and manage tools—the work that precedes and accompanies the work—to create a complete game-changer.
AI-led visibility accelerates value throughout the monitoring lifecycle
Separately or together, AI Stack and AppFusion equip your NetOps/SecOps teams to:
- Improve and accelerate anomaly detection
- Train and customize visibility solutions
- Analyze network traffic and potential threats by application type (audio, video, gaming etc.) without resource-intensive deep packet inspection (DPI)
- Predict audio/video streaming quality to improve user experience (UX)
- Analyze encrypted traffic using AI to predict content without performing costly decryption
- Improve cloud security and utilization by suppressing false alarms
Improved Cloud and Tool Utilization
Keysight’s AI-powered insight brokers optimize both the quality and volume of data sent to your monitoring solutions for analysis. Benefits include:
- Real-time enrichment of network and cloud data to drive analytics via hyper-scale data lakes
- Up to 20% reduction in data volumes that require analysis by monitoring tools
- Cloud service costs reduced by 10% or more
- Scale-on-demand activation of additional visibility and monitoring capabilities
Enhanced Hardware Provides the Power to See, Stack, and Scale
AI creates quantum leaps in processing times that require quantum leaps in processing power. Keysight’s enhanced Insight Brokers are architected to not only handle the workload but handle the growth of the workload.
The need to reliably process every packet to find every hidden clue threat becomes magnified in an AI-driven world. “Zero packet loss” reliability takes hardware—exceptional hardware backed by exception support.
