Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services
Summary Bullets:
• Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) uncovered exploitation of vulnerabilities nearly tripled last year, up 180% from 2022.
• The DBIR underscores the need for end-user education, with non-malicious human interactions associated with 68% of breaches.
Verizon’s 2024 DBIR paints a complex and challenging picture of the global threat landscape. Studying 30,458 security incidents and 10,626 confirmed breaches, the report saw a huge jump in vulnerability exploitations versus the prior year. Fourteen percent of all breaches involved the exploitation of vulnerabilities with Verizon assigning responsibility for this to the targeting of unpatched systems and zero day vulnerabilities. Verizon noted threat actors used MOVEit and other zero day exploits to launch their ransom demands.
• Microsoft and AWS continue to invest in GenAI partnerships.
• OSS technologies begin to disrupt the GenAI space.
Cloud giants, used to pulling out all the stops in the ongoing cloud wars, are now directing a good amount of efforts (and budget) at the generative AI (GenAI) arena. Microsoft has set its sights on global dominance in the GenAI space with a new $1.5 billion investment in an Abu Dhabi (UAE) AI initiative. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completed its final round of $4 billion in funding to partner Anthropic, striving to gain a foothold following Microsoft’s mega OpenAI investment.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon Bedrock in Australia, and it is helping customers develop generative AI (GenAI) applications using different foundation models to meet their specific needs.
• Australia is an attractive market for AWS since the company has a significant presence in the country, and it can support GenAI workloads sustainably as the country is seeing investments in clean energy and more efficient data centers.
AWS highlighted, at the recent AWS Summit in Sydney (Australia), that Australia was an important market for the company and that it was optimistic about the potential of GenAI adoption in the country. At the event, AWS also discussed its GenAI strategy. Rivals Microsoft and Google Cloud have been actively promoting their GenAI development through OpenAI and with Google Gemini, respectively, as well as building foundational models to help customers tap GenAI capabilities without building their own. While AWS has its models under the umbrella of Amazon Titan, it emphasizes giving customers their model of choice, including its own and partner models hosted within its cloud environment. This is through Amazon Bedrock, which is a fully managed service. It gives customers the ability to choose from a range of models based on their needs and preferences. They can develop GenAI capabilities and use cases without leaving the AWS environment. So far, AWS has agreements with several AI companies, natural language processing (NLP), and large language model (LLM) specialists, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, and Stability AI. The advancement of LLM is happening by leaps and bounds with new startups entering the fray and new versions being announced at an ever-faster pace. The introduction of Anthropic’s Claude 3, Mistral-Large, and Stable Diffusion 3, for example, have drawn global attention, offering even more powerful models and creating new possibilities such as self-awareness and actualization, tier reasoning capabilities, and video generation.
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