Building secure and resilient nation with search AI

At the National Day Rally 2024, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong acknowledged the profound impact artificial intelligence (AI) would have in transforming the way people work, collaborate and interact with each other.

With AI, public sector organisations can build better work processes and create new products for citizens that are personalised and locally relevant.

An IDC report in late 2023 found that 62 per cent of governments around the world would use AI in customer service and support in the next 12 months, while 49 per cent of educational institutions globally indicated that conversational apps (like chatbots and voice bots) have the most promise for near-term use.

An organisation today can use data such as patient healthcare records stored in the cloud or a database so that AI applications, like a healthcare chatbot, can provide relevant resources and recommendations based on medical history or challenges.

AI is also being scaled up for more advanced use cases, like smart city planning. By having holistic visibility into data concerning the performance of critical public services like water, electricity, or metrics like foot traffic, AI can help detect anomalies in infrastructure or assist with city planning to improve traffic flow.

AI holds promise to help public sector organisations address key priorities including operational resilience — so citizens can seamlessly access the services they need and security— to safeguard citizens’ sensitive private information.

The question is, how do we get the AI applications we know of today - tools that can answer simple questions, summarise or create documents and reports, or produce personalised recommendations - so organisations can securely use data for greater citizen benefits?

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Getting AI where we want it to be with a unified data mesh

For AI to truly revolutionise the way we work, organisations need all their relevant data to be searchable and accessible when they need it. Unfortunately, only 32 per cent of data within organizations is actively being put to work today, which leaves an undesirable amount of data taking up space and costing money to store without adding any value.

Organisations need to derive real-time value from data continuously by bringing all of their data, both structured and unstructured and from multiple sources, together into a system. The data will also need to be normalised so that the team (and AI) can make sense of the data for analysis, insights, and action.

The Elastic Search AI Platform can serve as a “data mesh”, a unifying data layer that provides near real-time access to all data from a common platform, with integrated security and data functions to help organisations reduce data silos, gain insights across systems, and make better decisions – without needing to move the data.

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Building a resilient and secure public sector

Public sector organisations can also use AI to bolster security by detecting incidents sooner, investigating suspicious behaviour faster, and responding quicker than before.

Elastic Security modernises security operations for the AI era by reducing risk from across the attack surface and adapting to teams’ evolving needs with an open, interoperable solution.

The Elastic Search AI Platform can safely retrieve hyper-relevant knowledge, enabling AI models to deliver meaningful results, assist in security analyst workflows, and provide accurate real-time visibility into an attack surface, all while ensuring confidentiality of an organisation’s proprietary or citizen data.

The Texas A&M University System in the United States educates over 153,000 students a year and is at the heart of an international research network, with thousands of students using personal devices, making it a prime target for state-sponsored actors and hackers.

The Texas A&M University System deploys Elastic Security automatically on all devices in its universities, agencies, emergency response teams, and research organisations. Instead of using several security products and portals, every security analyst uses the same platform to investigate and remediate incidents.

By using Elastic Security, the Texas A&M System saves over 100 hours of security analyst time every month by automating processes and documentation and has reduced incident resolution time by 99 per cent while rapidly integrating additional security features.

Elastic can also help build mission and operational resilience by providing holistic visibility across an agency's entire IT environment. Elastic Observability brings together metrics, logs, and traces that deliver unified visibility and actionable insights for an organisation, using generative AI and machine learning to automate anomaly detection and accelerate root cause analysis based on performance data.

The Swedish Public Employment Service provides information, analysis, and employment forecasts to create the best conditions for a well-functioning labour market in Sweden.

The organisation uses Elastic Observability for logging and APM, hosted on ECE (Elastic Cloud Enterprise), to replace its legacy search and logging tools.

With Elastic Observability in place for logging and APM, the organisation reduced application performance monitoring (APM) license and storage costs by 75 per cent, and is accelerating its transition to a modern DevOps culture, by fixing errors earlier in the software development process and improving product quality.

Based in Singapore, Chris Walker is the Vice President of Solutions Architecture in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region of Elastic, where he is responsible for leading the team of pre-sales engineers in the region.

Find out more about how public sector organisations are using Elastic with Principal Solution Architect, Jie-Hong Lim’s presentation, “Strengthening Public Services with AI: Elastic’s Strategies for Resilience, Security, Observability, and Citizen-Centric Operations” at the AWS Public Sector Day Singapore happening on 3rd October 2024, at Raffles City Convention Centre.

Find out more and register for the event here.