Mark Wah, VP Analyst at Gartner, says intelligent simulation is revolutionizing cybersecurity by enabling continuous, AI-driven risk modeling and proactive threat mitigation through digital twins, transforming security from reactive to preemptive.
Intelligent simulation provides modelling and what-if scenarios of both physical and digital process systems at unprecedented scale and accuracy using digital technologies such as AI, digital twins, quantum computing, spatial computing and Internet of Things. When combined with deep domain expertise, these technologies empower businesses across industries such as manufacturing, marketing and healthcare to explore new and lower-risk business capabilities across use cases or business domains. Now, intelligent simulation is expanding beyond its traditional applications and is set to revolutionize critical sectors like security.
Transforming Security Operations: From Reactive to Preemptive
Intelligent simulation is poised to transform security operations by shifting the focus from reactive detection and response to preemptive cybersecurity. Organizations can use intelligent simulation to model complex environments, simulate potential attacks and predict changes to their security posture. This approach offers a dynamic and continuous method for risk assessment and offensive security strategies, including penetration testing, red teaming and bug bounty programs. It can also address limitations found in adversarial exposure validation (AEV) tools, such as breach and attack simulation. Cybersecurity product leaders must enable what-now, what-if and what-next security scenarios by simulating adversarial behaviors to provide continuous risk assessment and empower proactive, preemptive cybersecurity strategies through intelligent simulation (see Figure 1).
Countering AI-Driven Threats
As AI-driven threats escalate, what-if risk analysis has become essential for effective exposure management. Intelligent simulation offers a dynamic and comprehensive approach that goes beyond static analysis or periodic testing. By building on digital twin concepts and leveraging technologies such as graph databases, artificial intelligence, real-time data, and synthetic data; intelligent simulation creates an accurate, continuously updated representation of an organization’s infrastructure.
Within this simulated environment, security teams can conduct ongoing risk assessments and detailed attack simulations using attack playbooks curated from sources such as threat intelligence and novel approaches generated by AI models. This enables organizations to explore what-if scenarios, such as evaluating the impact of potential threats or understanding how changes in configurations and code deployments could affect security posture before implementation. Early vendor applications of intelligent simulation include validating potential attacks, identifying attack surfaces and threat vectors in real time and assessing changes within cloud and other environments.
Unlike traditional methods that rely on periodic scans or agent-based simulations in production, intelligent simulation allows for rapid iteration and testing in a safe digital twin environment, minimizing operational risk and empowering security teams to take a more proactive approach.
Overcoming Adoption Challenges for Intelligent Simulation
As intelligent simulation technology matures, its ability to deliver a more complete and continuous view of an organization’s security posture positions it as a disruptive force in the market. This advancement has the potential to displace some existing adversarial exposure validation products and passive security scanners, opening new opportunities in the rapidly evolving landscape of exposure management.
However, product leaders must address important market education challenges to drive adoption. Differentiating intelligent simulation from traditional security validation methods, such as AEV tools, is essential. Leaders need to clearly communicate the benefits of comprehensive, continuous and safe validation within a digital twin environment, highlighting its superiority over periodic and potentially disruptive approaches.
Seamless integration with existing tools, processes and frameworks is also critical, ensuring that security controls and remediation strategies deliver the intended outcomes. By enabling users to safely model and validate the impact of changes or recommended actions before deploying them to production, intelligent simulation empowers organizations to strengthen their security posture with confidence.