Symantec, a division of Broadcom Inc., is partnering with Google Cloud to embed generative AI (gen AI) into the Symantec Security platform in a phased rollout that will give customers a significant technical edge for detecting, understanding, and remediating sophisticated cyber attacks.

Symantec is leveraging the Google Cloud Security AI Workbench and security-specific large language model (LLM)--Sec-PaLM 2-across its portfolio to enable natural language interfaces and generate more comprehensive and easy-to-understand threat analyses. With Security AI Workbench-powered summarization of complex incidents and alignment to MITRE ATT&CK context, security operations center (SOC) analysts of all levels can better understand threats and be able to respond faster. That, in turn, translates into greater security and higher SOC productivity."Symantec has a long history of designing, implementing, and fine-tuning artificial intelligence and machine learning for critical security use cases and helping our customers drive value out of AI," said Adam Bromwich, CTO and Head of Engineering, Symantec Enterprise Division, Broadcom. "Our partnership with Google Cloud is part of that continuing journey to put the most innovative security solutions possible into user hands. Our engineers have simplified the process in ways that will enable customers to be much more productive and effective. This is just the beginning of a great collaboration that will help to kickstart the benefits of AI throughout the broader security ecosystem."

Symantec + Google Cloud: Collaboration Between Industry Leaders
The Symantec and Google Cloud collaboration brings together two of technology's most accomplished innovators to address a growing cybersecurity talent gap: as the enterprise attack surface expands and becomes more complex, companies struggle to hire security analysts with deep expertise. Symantec's products will help compensate for this skills shortage, providing less experienced staff with assistive features that summarize threat information in natural language and offer easy ways to operate security products without requiring staffers to learn difficult syntaxes.

Google Cloud has been a key partner in accelerating Broadcom's growth strategy for several years. Broadcom successfully migrated Symantec Cloud Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) onto Google Cloud. Broadcom also modernized the security stack and standardized service delivery processes and offerings on Google Cloud infrastructure, allowing the company to scale and operate more efficiently to better serve enterprise customers.

"Google Cloud and Symantec are working together to deliver AI-infused security that makes threat detection faster and more actionable for all levels of security analysts," said Sunil Potti, GM and VP of Cloud Security at Google Cloud. "Together, Google Cloud and Symantec are helping to optimize the effectiveness of security controls while removing the manual drudgery that slows implementation, policy tuning, and response times."

Symantec's long history and expertise with security-targeted AI and ML, along with Google Cloud's scale and rich gen AI models, is a powerful combination for customers protecting complex environments. As part of the partnership, Symantec shared query language samples with Google Cloud to help its Sec-PaLM 2 LLM better interact with its specific systems—resulting in improved workflows. Symantec's Global Intelligence Network provides deep visibility into threats and customers will be able to leverage this telemetry more effectively with advances in gen AI.

"All security vendors will likely embed generative AI into their solutions if they haven't done so already," said Frank Dickson, Group Vice President, Security & Trust at IDC. "True innovators will have a deep understanding of how to tap into the predictive models behind generative AI to produce better security data and enable better outcomes. Companies with rich sets of data and expertise in AI/ML are certainly worth keeping an eye on."

Google Cloud Security AI Workbench to Speed and Enhance Symantec Security Solutions
This initial phase of gen AI adoption requires no updates on products or processes and uses Symantec's existing externally facing sites. Existing customers can benefit from the enhanced security provided by new features now available for Symantec solutions:

• Rapid access to enhanced and descriptive threat descriptions
• Easy-to-understand descriptions of the actions performed by malicious scripts and complex machine code (assembly variants - Intel, ARM, etc.)
• Increased performance and throughput to identify malicious binary files
• Closed loop systems that ensure all output is vetted by a human analyst