Why visibility is the new frontline of cybersecurity
Why visibility is the new frontline of cybersecurity
https://www.afr.com/technology/why-visibility-is-the-new-frontline-of-cybersecurity-20260528-p601r0
Publish Date: 2026-05-31 19:20:00
Source Domain: www.afr.com
As such, Security Operations Centres (SOCs) are increasingly relying on AI agents to manage the sheer volume of digital threats. These tools allow teams to detect and resolve security incidents quickly, significantly cutting down the time it takes to stop a live attack, explains, Michelle Abraham, senior research director in the International Data Corporation’s Security and Trust Group.
Overcoming blind spots
The ability for AI agents to observe all relevant data, agent actions and system states in real time – with few blind spots – is a baseline requirement, Abraham continues. This includes transparency to correlate signals across domains such as identity, endpoint, network, cloud and SaaS.
“AI agents require zero blind spot visibility in order to detect lateral movement, privilege escalation and multi-stage attacks, in order to provide auditable, explainable and reversible actions,” she says.
“Relying on fragmented data and control planes means agents operate with partial context, which leads to missed detections, increased false positives and negatives, and the inability to track agent actions or explain outcomes.”
This shift necessitates a pivot away from legacy pricing that rations data and towards a model where AI is grounded in the organisation’s full, searchable data foundation.
The legacy model of charging per endpoint has left many Australian enterprises with blind spots in their network due to budget constraints, says Mike Nichols, general manager of Security at search AI platform Elastic.
Along with eliminating per-endpoint pricing to facilitate oversight across the enterprise, Elastic’s search and analytics capabilities also ensure AI agents are across data stored in a wide range of environments, including long-term cost-effective object stores like AWS S3 and Google Blob.
Context is king for real-time response
As threat actors leverage AI efficiencies to attack smaller targets, Nichols says zero blind spot visibility is not just a concern…
