How agentic AI can alleviate vulnerability risks for security operation

Security and IT operations (SecOps) teams face serious fatigue dealing with rapidly evolving threats. Traditional vulnerability management requires too much manual investigation before finding a fix. SecOps teams can take weeks and even months to review documentation, make recommendations, and coordinate vulnerability patches. That’s a lot of time for an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities and potentially compromise your organization’s systems and data.

The real problem is most security teams don’t have enough knowledge about what’s running in their IT and DevOps environments to understand, prioritize, and fix critical vulnerabilities. When the list of vulnerabilities gets passed onto the IT operations and DevOps teams, they often don’t know how to remediate the vulnerability. These teams need to manually search and investigate the proper remediation steps.

How agentic AI can help

Generative AI and agentic AI can help SecOps teams transform their approach to vulnerability management. BMC’s State of GenAI and Agentic AI for IT report found:

• 49% of respondents want AI to detect, prioritize, and resolve vulnerabilities
• 43% see automated vulnerability risk resolution in their future

With agentic AI, SecOps teams can shorten the time to resolve exposures, improve compliance and risk management, and collaborate on ways to keep their business resilient.

BMC HelixGPT Vulnerability Resolver is an AI assistant within BMC Helix AIOps and Observability that helps SecOps teams quickly address vulnerabilities through risk and impact analysis, task automation, and remediation recommendations. By consolidating vulnerability data, the BMC HelixGPT Vulnerability Resolver gives you a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities affecting critical business services. Seeing the risk and impact side-by-side with service health, teams will know which services and owners with the highest levels of vulnerability risks need rapid remediation or attention.

To assist teams in responding swiftly, the AI assistant offers a summary of each vulnerability from the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list, along with a link to full details. Most importantly, the BMC HelixGPT Vulnerability Resolver recommends actions for addressing each critical vulnerability. If code changes are needed for remediation, the code wizard is enabled to provide the required code change. In a click, IT operations and DevOps teams can create a change request in a ticketing system for each affected asset using the remediation steps provided by the AI assistant. In addition, pertinent information about the vulnerability is also included in the change request.

How CIOs can CISOs can partner to successfully implement agentic AI

Today, SecOps spends too much time on vulnerability research and remediation and can be slow in addressing critical vulnerabilities. As AI assistants evolve, understanding and harnessing their full potential may transform vulnerability management. Assistants that combine machine learning with specialized domains, such as causal and predictive AI, could drive even greater efficiency and autonomy.

BMC Helix AIOps integrates causal, predictive, and generative AI to analyze observability data, identify the root cause, and access the impact an incident has on services. The solution’s predictive AI scans for non-obvious trends in the data to detect impending and ongoing issues, while causal AI correlates and causally associates anomalies. When the solution detects a critical situation that requires a deeper-dive, agentic AI is used to identify scenarios, like risks associated with vulnerabilities and security threats, by pulling just-in-time data processed with generative AI.

The BMC Helix AIOps solution increases collaboration between IT and security operations, enabling teams to share responsibility for identifying and quickly resolving security vulnerabilities. With the BMC HelixGPT Vulnerability Resolver assistant, SecOps will understand the impact on business services and resolve critical vulnerabilities faster.

See the BMC HelixGPT Vulnerability Resolver demo to learn agentic AI in action. Contact BMC for more information.