Drowning in security data: Why federal cybersecurity demands an AI-first future

Federal agencies today are facing a dual crisis in cybersecurity. On one hand, the number and sophistication of threat vectors are expanding at an alarming rate. On the other hand, the very tools deployed to counter these threats are generating an overwhelming tidal wave of telemetry data.

This creates a dangerous paradox and a mounting challenge for government leaders.  The cost of managing security data has gone through the roof, due to a combination of factors including expanding cloud, IoT and GenAI adoption, increased federal regulatory and reporting demands, and the need to gather complex endpoint and identity management data.

At the same time, their ability to fuse all that data into a unified, actionable view of the threat has not kept pace. Agencies were already struggling to build the right suite of technologies to respond quickly and effectively to the rising level of AI-powered attacks and increasingly sophisticated nation-state, hackivist and cybercriminal adversaries. Now, they’re also facing the reality of budget tightening and staffing cuts.

To win this fight, leaders must fundamentally rethink their approach to managing their cybersecurity data. Agencies need to adopt AI-centric technologies that can process, assess, and autonomously respond to security data at machine speed.

To that end, government leaders need to take three crucial actions that capitalize on AI-native solutions:

1. Understand the marketplace for AI-native technology: Agencies must actively seek out solutions that were built for the AI era, versus solutions where artificial intelligence is bolted onto legacy code. Understanding the core underlying technology of any new solution and how it operates within the technology stack is essential. It’s also necessary to understand whether it can evolve to meet the next threat, or if it will leave you mostly in the position of addressing future attacks with automated versions of yesterday’s tools.
2. Adopt a data-centric view of security: Agencies need to spend more time understanding and prioritizing all the data they possess, how it can be used in a single, unified way, and how much they are paying to have it stored across different systems. Understanding the data pipeline and how this can be prioritized and filtered upstream – before incurring storage costs – is the most important step a federal buyer can take to optimize their budget and improve their security posture.
3. Take a hard look at ‘free’ and ‘included-with-your-productivity-suite’ security: Be discerning about security products that are included with or offered for free with other services. In many cases, you may be accepting a significant mission risk with a less-capable solution in exchange for a perceived cost saving. A thorough cost-benefit analysis must include the potential impact of deploying a tool that isn’t technically superior and cuts corners.

By taking these steps, federal agencies can better address their most pressing security and budget challenges:

First, they can gain unified visibility and truly actionable insight. The goal is to move from managing disparate telemetry to having an AI-oriented, real-time detection and response platform that allows you to use all of your security data to protect your agency effectively. This means turning a flood of information into a single, coherent view of the threat, enabling faster, more intelligent responses.

Second, agencies can escape the legacy technology trap. By consciously choosing platforms built with an AI-first vision and an AI-native foundation, you are not just buying a tool for today but investing in a capability that can rapidly evolve. This approach provides the resilience needed to meet an ever-changing threat landscape and ensures you have the power and speed of AI on your side.

Third, this strategy allows for significant optimization of data costs. By deploying a modern platform designed for data fusion, smart filtering and low-cost “hot” storage, agencies can reduce their data hosting costs and simultaneously extract better, more valuable information from that data to protect themselves. It’s a crucial shift from simply paying to store data to investing in the ability to use it.

At SentinelOne, our focus is, and always has been, on building best-in-class cybersecurity technologies, including AI-powered detection, real-time visibility and automated remediation. Our AI-first vision is about bringing the speed and power of AI to our customers and providing the essential data fusion that turns information into protection, earning us recognition as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Programs for the fifth year in a row. This singular focus extends to the unique needs of the federal government, including investing in innovative on-premises solutions for the most classified environments—a commitment not often seen in the industry.

Our close partnership with AWS multiplies our capabilities and commitment. By working together, we gain a deeper understanding of our federal customers’ security environments. AWS’s unparalleled volume of native telemetry data, combined with our AI-powered solutions, allows us to cross-correlate security data and turn it into actionable intelligence for a federal security operations center.

SentinelOne’s cloud-native architecture integrates with various AWS services, including AWS Security Hub, AWS GuardDuty, and Amazon Security Lake, offering a robust, centrally managed defense layer for government agencies handling complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Protecting the entire stack enables our customers to speed up their secure migration projects and manage workloads with greater confidence. It also helps our customers control their data costs more effectively.

The security challenges facing federal agencies are immense but not insurmountable. By moving away from legacy constraints and embracing an AI-first, data-centric strategy, leaders can build a more resilient, efficient, and effective defense to protect our nation’s most critical assets.

Learn more about how SentinelOne and AWS can help your agency optimize its AI and cloud use.

Discover how other AWS partners are helping agencies accelerate their AI and cloud modernization efforts.

This article was sponsored by AWS and SentinelOne.