Tapping the Potential of AI in Health Data Security
Infosys' Navin Budhiraja on Emerging Uses of AI for Protecting PHIThe ability of artificial intelligence to look for patterns in vast volumes of data - including large collections of unstructured data, which are commonly found in the healthcare sector - is presenting new potential ways for bolstering the security of patient information, says AI expert Navin Budhiraja of outsourcing vendor Infosys.
"The nature [of healthcare data], how rapidly new [challenges] are appearing and how large and complex those systems are becoming, are making the security problems very, very hard," he says in an interview with Information Security Media Group.
"So, how do you look at very large amounts of data - not necessarily knowing what you're looking for - and still actually try to find interesting patterns in there around who's accessing what; is their behavior expected or anomalous, and so on? I think the traditional ways of doing security, like where you have an anti-virus system or a particular way your firewall is configured because those are the best practice, are no longer applicable because of this complex IT environment," he says.
"And those are exactly the kinds of challenges AI is very good at."
Also, emerging in healthcare is the application of AI for improving security around "small, low-powered" medical devices and consumer wearable health devices, he notes.
"The data that's generated [by these devices] are very fragmented and spread all over the place," he notes.
AI has the potential to protect that and other data "against attacks you've never seen before," he adds.
In the interview (see audio link below photo), Budhiraja also discusses:
- How AI's use in security can potentially address malicious, as well as unintentional data, privacy and security breaches in healthcare, as well as in other sectors;
- The types of skills and expertise that are needed by cybersecurity professionals who work with AI;
- The security challenges that are presented by non-security AI-based applications and software used for other purposes.
In his current role as Infosys senior vice president of architecture and technology, Budhiraja is responsible for defining and evolving technology strategy and architecture of multi-product and multi-industry portfolios practiced by large teams. Budhiraja started his career at the IBM Watson Research Center and holds multiple patents in business process modeling and process integration. He has over 20 years of experience in engineering, design and product architecture. Budhiraja's other previous positions include chief architect at SuccessFactors, which was acquired by SAP; vice president of engineering at Center'd, which was acquired by Google; and chief architect of Amazon AWS Flexible Payments Services. He has also held leadership positions at Augmemtum and at Vitria Technology.