‘We want to be a co-pilot in India’s AI journey’

Last year, Microsoft launched the Secure Future Initiative (SFI), an effort to advance cybersecurity protection. IRINA GHOSE, managing director, Microsoft India and South Asia talks about the initiative and how Indian enterprises are looking at cybersecurity. October is also the month of cybersecurity awareness. She tells Shivani Shinde over a video call, how AI is getting infused in security and Microsoft’s focus in the new year. Edited excerpts:

- IRINA GHOS

Microsoft launched SFI last year, how has it progressed in India?

In the age of AI, the cybersecurity landscape has been changing rapidly. While the AI's transformative power is reshaping a new generation of tools, tactics, new opportunities, at the same time threats are also increasing at an accelerating pace. Three years back the number of signals we were looking and monitoring were about 8 trillion, that has now reached 78 trillion, which was 65 trillion last year.

This is how exponential steep this curve has been. Microsoft Secure Future initiative is designed for building technologies that are secure by design, secure by default and secure all operations. When we launched this last year, it was to protect ourselves and customers and industry, and also look at all the threats. This is the largest cyber security engineering effort in history. It's a multi-year commitment that has an equivalent of 34,000 full-time engineers dedicated to it.

How are you using AI/GenAI in security and what has been the impact on operations?