Transforming public sector security operations in the AI era

The cyberthreat landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, becoming increasingly dangerous and complex. Nation-state threat actors and cybercriminals are employing advanced tactics and generative AI to execute highly sophisticated attacks. This situation is further compounded by outdated technology and systems, shortage of cybersecurity talent, and antiquated processes, which are inefficient in handling the scale, complexity, and ever-evolving nature of these cyberattacks. With 62% of all cyberattacks targeting public sector organizations, it is crucial for these sectors to leverage state-of-the-art technology, powered by generative AI, to transform their cyber defense and stay ahead of these evolving threats.¹

Microsoft’s unified security operations for public sector

Embracing modern security technology, processes, and continuous skill development is vital for protecting public sector organizations. By leveraging innovations powered by generative AI, unparalleled threat intelligence, and best practices, public sectors can transform their security operations to effectively defend against emerging cyberthreats.

AI-powered security operations: Microsoft delivers innovations to effectively protect against today’s complex threat landscape. The AI-powered unified security operations platform offers an enhanced and streamlined approach to security operations by integrating security information and event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), extended detection and response (XDR), posture and exposure management, cloud security, threat intelligence, and AI into a single, cohesive experience, eliminating silos and providing end-to-end security operations (SecOps). The unified platform boosts analyst efficiency, reduces context switching, and delivers quicker time to value with less integration work.

Microsoft is committed to helping public sector customers accelerate threat detection and response through improved security posture across organizations with richer insights, multi-tenant management, early warnings, and increased efficiency through automation and generative AI. Through automatic attack disruption, Microsoft Defender XDR utilizes robust threat intelligence, advanced AI and machine learning to detect and contain sophisticated cyberattacks in real time, significantly reducing their impact. This high-fidelity detection and protection capability disrupts more than 40,000 incidents each month, like identity threats and human-operated cyberattacks, while maintaining a false positive rate below 1%.

“Speed is an important factor against adversaries, and gaining situational awareness across a complex landscape of threats is therefore key.”

—Customer in the healthcare industry

People and process modernization: Public-private partnerships play a vital role in fostering the exchange of best practices and developing standardized processes that drive efficiency in incident response and threat intelligence sharing. For example, adapting the threat triage process to leverage generative AI agents can enable teams to scale significantly with agents autonomously analyzing and triaging vast volumes of alerts in real time, prioritize critical cyberthreats, and recommend specific remediation steps based on historical patterns. These collaborations also empower organizations to build teams equipped with cutting-edge skills and a comprehensive understanding of generative AI capabilities, helping them stay ahead of emerging cyberthreats.

Collective cyber defense and threat intelligence: Using Microsoft’s global threat intelligence insights, public sector organizations can collaborate with each other and across other sectors to share deeper cyberthreat insights efficiently. This partnership enables public sector organizations to exchange threat intelligence in a standardized manner within a region or country.

“Collective defense collaborations are driven by mutual interests with industry peers and cybersecurity alliances on improving security postures and responding more effectively to emerging threats.”

—Customer in the transport industry

The power of generative AI in cyber operations

Generative AI brings several transformative benefits to cybersecurity, making it a cornerstone for public sector security operations center (SOC) modernization.

Enhanced threat detection and response: Generative AI has the potential to sift through data from firewalls, endpoints, and cloud workloads, surfacing actionable cyberthreats that might go unnoticed in manual reviews. Unlike traditional rule-based detection methods, generative AI can identify attack patterns, adapt to emerging cyberthreats, and prioritize incidents based on risk severity, helping security teams focus on the most critical issues. Generative AI can go beyond simply surfacing cyberthreats; it can contextualize attack signals, predict potential breaches, and recommend guided responses for remediation strategies, reducing the burden on security analysts. Microsoft Security Copilot is already covering a range of use cases and is expanding rapidly to seize the full potential of generative AI. By providing guided incident investigation and response, Security Copilot helps security operations center (SOC) teams to detect and respond to cyberthreats more effectively. It can help teams to learn about malicious actors and campaigns, provide rapid summaries, and even contact the user to check for suspicious behavior. Adoption is associated with 30% reduction in security incident mean time to resolution (MTTR).²

Reduced operational overheads: By automating routine tasks, generative AI can free analysts from repetitive processes like alert triage or patch validation, enabling them to focus on advanced threat hunting. Security teams can already leverage Security Copilot to translate complex scripts into natural language, highlighting and explaining key parts to enhance team skills and reduce investigation time for advanced investigations as much as by 85%, helping security teams operate at scale.³

“Increased support from AI is critical given the significant capacity challenge in the public sector: a shortage of talent, an influx of threats, and an ever-increasing volume of data, assets, and organizations.”

—National SOC customer

Building a resilient digital future together

As nation-state threat actors and cybercriminals increasingly employ generative AI in their cyberattacks, public sector organizations can no longer rely on fragmented, manual defenses. The path forward lies in public-private collaboration, centered on co-designing and innovating solutions tailored to the public sector’s unique needs.

By adopting Microsoft Security solutions, public sector organizations can leverage combined resources, expertise, and cutting-edge technology to fortify critical infrastructure, safeguard citizen data, and strengthen public trust.

Now is the time to act: Modernize your cyber defense in the AI era to collectively forge a more secure and resilient digital future for government and public sector operations.

Learn more

Learn more about the AI-Powered Security Operations Platform for more details on the unified Security Operations platform.

Learn more about Microsoft Sentinel.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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¹Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024

²Generative AI and Security Operations Center Productivity: Evidence from Live Operations, Microsoft study. James Bono, Alec Xu, Justin Grana. November 24, 2024.

³Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Sentinel. The Total Economic Impact^(TM) Of Microsoft Sentinel, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, March 2024. Results are based on a composite organization representative of interviewed customers.