Two and a half quintillion bytes of data are generated around the world every day. In fact, 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone. As companies are struggling to get to grips with data management, there is also an evolving challenge in regard to cyber security and organisations’ ability to secure vast quantities of data effectively. To address this challenge cognitive technologies like Watson have thus emerged as a critical evolution in the cybersecurity space. After training for a year on the language of cybersecurity, the artificial intelligence engine is entering a beta phase with 40+ security teams around the world and Smarttech is now the only company in Europe to be included on the IBM Watson for Cybersecurity to be included in the program, helping companies like Abtran secure their business from online threats.

Abtran is the first company in Ireland to utilise cognitive computing in the form of IBM Watson for cybersecurity. IBM Watson is the first technology to offer cognition of security data at scale using Watson’s ability to reason and learn from “unstructured data”. IBM Watson for Cyber Security is designed to provide valuable insights into emerging threats and recommendations on how to effectively stop them, increasing the speed and capabilities of security professionals.

“Abtran deal with massive amounts of data on a daily basis and security is at the heart of everything we touch. Much of that data is unstructured: documents, social media content and other information that does not reside in conventional databases and it can’t be parsed by traditional algorithms or machine analysis. Using IBM Watson for Cyber Security allows Abtran to stay ahead of the curve when securing this data and ensuring our customers and their data stay safe.”, says Martin Leahy, CTO Abtran.

IBM Watson for cybersecurity has changed how information security professionals defend against attacks by blending human-generated security knowledge with more traditional security data.

“Cognitive intelligence brings meaning to data through human-like understanding of natural language queries. With the help of IBM Watson, Smarttech deliver managed security services to provide real-time analysis of an organisation’s entire network system and a deeper visibility across the entire IT infrastructure through our Security Operations Centre. “, adds Ronan Murphy CEO Smarttech.