When it comes to cybersecurity, there is one weak link that every company shares: end users. They make mistakes, ignore security alerts, and find workarounds that create major vulnerabilities.

An entire suite of best-of-breed tools have cropped up to secure end users. Endpoint protection, identity management, SIEM, etc. each address a critical piece of the user security puzzle. But putting together the puzzle pieces into one holistic picture of security risk introduces challenges for security and IT teams.

With every new security solution comes a new set of alerts. Your ability to identify new areas of potential risk increases, but your team’s bandwidth to actually address these risks is unchanged. The fact is, many alerts do not receive proper attention due to the time it takes security and IT teams to engage users to remediate risk.

The last mile problem in cybersecurity

Security’s last mile problem isn’t going away. Even with new best-of-breed tools, remediating risk still requires end users to take some sort of action themselves, whether that’s installing a patch, restarting their device, or removing unapproved software.

To keep user security continuous and scalable, it has to be decentralized. This means shifting ownership out to where risk actually lives — empowering the people, devices, and systems at the edge to take action directly. Those actions must happen intelligently and automatically, without needing tickets, follow-ups, or top-down enforcement.

In other words, user security must be autonomous.

What is autonomous user security?

Autonomous user security refers to security measures and systems that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to independently identify, analyze, and respond to potential security threats related to user behavior without significant human intervention. ‍

“Significant” is the key word here. AI is used to automate user engagement, drive remediation, and close security gaps in real time — reducing the burden on security and IT teams, while still keeping end users in the loop. It is this important step that transforms the typical automated blanket approach (e.g., automatically forcing a reboot at a certain time) into a harmonious workflow that improves security hygiene without disrupting productivity.

Autonomous user security leverages AI to preserve productivity

Autonomous user security achieves the unique balance of automating user security while keeping user experience and productivity intact. This has been an elusive goal, but AI can finally make it happen.

• Instead of stopping at visibility, autonomous user security analyzes risk signals from your security stack, prioritizes alerts, and automatically engages users to triage them appropriately.
• Instead of forcing a reboot that interrupts users’ work (for example, a forced security update that shuts down your computer right in the middle of an important zoom call), autonomous user security makes users part of the security workflows without disrupting productivity.
• Instead of relying on IT teams to chase users, autonomous user security activates end users directly in two-way conversations to provide context, answer questions, and empower them to take action.

By making users part of the fix, not just a source of risk, autonomous user security reduces burden on security and IT teams while improving user and endpoint hygiene. It’s AI-powered where it matters and human-activated where it counts.

AI-powered automation that puts users at the center 

In previous blog posts, we’ve talked about the importance of having a user security graph and human-in-the-loop automation; autonomous user security is what happens when you put those two together.

By leveraging the power of AI to understand and secure the human element within an organization's digital environment, autonomous user security is a significant step towards a more proactive and efficient cybersecurity posture. This enables solutions to serve as both the system of record for user risk and the system of action that engages users to reduce it.