Artificial intelligence (and generative AI specifically) have emerged as both an offensive tool and a defensive ally for enterprise organizations.

While enterprises use AI to improve visibility, strengthen defenses, and automate response, malicious actors are putting AI to work to rapidly scale attacks and mutate their approaches to avoid detection. According to IBM’s recent report³, 16% of breaches reportedly involved attackers using AI, often in phishing and deepfake attacks. AI helps bad actors compress their attack timelines from weeks to hours, which makes it imperative that organizations can detect threats and respond to them in near real time.

Cybercriminals have embraced AI to launch sophisticated, multi-pronged campaigns. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 report⁴, 47% of organizations indicated GenAI as a top concern as cybercriminals harness the “efficiency of AI to automate and personalize deceptive communications,” and some 42% of organizations reported that they had experienced a successful social engineering attack in the past year.

What once took weeks or months to orchestrate can now unfold in hours or days. The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report⁵ found that 44% of breaches now involve ransomware, as attackers exploit expanded attack surfaces across cloud environments, IoT devices, and remote endpoints. Check Point Software’s State of Cybersecurity 2025⁶ report found that organizations, on average, experience 1,673 attacks per week, which is 44% higher than the average number of weekly attacks per organization in 2023. The attacks enterprise organizations face today are more complex, realistic, and targeted than ever before.

Enterprise organizations face multiple challenges as AI-driven attacks increase because skilled security professionals continue to be in short supply. Cybersecurity skills gaps result in organizations with insufficient threat intelligence expertise, a lack of cloud security specialists, inadequate incident response capabilities, and simply not enough personnel to maintain security operations. And according to ISC2⁷, the global cybersecurity workforce gap reached 4.8 million in 2024, a 19% increase over 2023.

The skills gap doesn’t simply mean organizations are understaffed. It means they are at risk. Security leaders struggle to identify which skills their organization lacks and building an internal security operations center requires significant investment in talent, tools, and training. With teams stretched thin, alert fatigue becomes an overwhelming reality, and vulnerabilities remain unchecked as threats continue to multiply.

Without sufficient coverage and coordination, even mature organizations can face prolonged downtime and costly remediation. When talent shortages go unaddressed, security operations suffer—and the financial impact is measurable. According to IBM’s research⁸, the skills shortage adds an average of $1.76 million in additional breach costs. Fortinet’s 2024 Global Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report⁹ also found that 58% of organizations cite untrained IT staff as a major cause of data breaches. These cybersecurity operational skills gaps translate directly into business risk.

Zero-trust network architecture (ZTNA) is built on the principle of “never trust, always verify” and it has become a core tenet of cyber resilience. Every access request must be authenticated and authorized whether it is coming from an internal or external source. With ZTNA, identity becomes the new perimeter, with security policies enforcing least-privilege access to minimize potential damage from compromised credentials.

Industry watchers expect ZTNA to continue to grow in popularity as cloud-native security frameworks extend protections across public and private cloud environments, on-premises data centers, edge computing locations, and remote workforces. Gartner predicts¹⁰ that, by 2027, universal ZTNA will reach greater than 40% adoption, and, by 2028, “60% of Zero Trust technologies will actively use AI capabilities to identify anomalous behavior and potential threats in real time, enabling preemptive cybersecurity measures.”

ZTNA offers strategies to avert attacks and minimize the damage they cause when successful. For instance, microsegmentation is a critical component of ZTNA. By dividing networks into smaller, isolated segments with granular access controls, organizations can prevent lateral movement and prevent an attacker from gaining access to the entire environment. Attackers use lateral movement to spread from an initial foothold in an environment to the more high-value targets. But with ZTNA, even if bad actors gain access to one segment, they cannot move freely across the entire environment.

Managed security service providers (MSSPs) offer enterprises access to leading-edge technologies, skilled experts, and continuous support—without the significant investment in security operations center.

MSSPs can provide organizations with access to best-of-breed technologies and hands-on experience with the latest tools that very few organizations can keep pace with internally. Partnering with an MSSP ensures that security technologies are current by integrating updates and new capabilities automatically into the service offering.

Managed security services have become a strategic differentiator for many by allowing enterprise organizations to significantly improve their security posture without exorbitant and costly capital investments.

The threat landscape will only continue to grow more challenging and expansive. AI-powered attacks, skills shortages, and increasingly distributed operations demand a fundamental rethinking of enterprise security. Organizations that transform from reactive defense to proactive resilience—leveraging advanced technologies, expert management, and comprehensive strategies—will not only survive these challenges but gain a competitive advantage through superior operational stability.

The question isn’t whether to invest in cyber resilience, but how quickly you can partner with industry experts to build the capabilities necessary to protect your business in an AI-driven world. Connection’s managed security services, powered by Cisco XDR and Managed Firewall technologies, provide the expertise, technology, and strategic partnership to accelerate your journey.