CIO OPINION
AI is democratising sophisticated attack capabilities once limited to nation-state actors .
John Engates , Field CTO , Cloudflare
Reimagining security architecture that operates at machine speed
While AI accelerates software development by orders of magnitude , security teams operate at human speed . Traditional security approaches , designed for human-paced development and human attackers , are rapidly becoming liabilities in an AI-driven world . This disparity between development velocity and security capability is becoming actively dangerous says John Engates , Cloudflare .
The uncomfortable truth facing security leaders today is stark : within 18 months , most enterprise cloud security strategies will be obsolete . This prediction is not hyperbole or fearmongering – it is the inevitable consequence of an unprecedented collision between AI-accelerated development and traditional security models . Consider this reality : Google now generates 25 % of its code through AI , and companies worldwide will follow suit . Some smaller companies are developing 100 % of their code with the help of AI . Meanwhile , most security teams remain tethered to human-scale tools and processes .
Math is simple but alarming . While AI accelerates software development by orders of magnitude , security teams operate at human speed . Traditional security approaches , designed for human-paced development and human attackers , are rapidly becoming liabilities in an AI-driven world . This growing disparity between development velocity and security capability is not just unsustainable – it is becoming actively dangerous .
Three seismic shifts are converging to make current cloud security strategies untenable : the industrialisation of AI-powered development , the democratisation of sophisticated attacks , and the dissolution of traditional security boundaries .
AI is not just augmenting development ; it is industrialising it . Beyond AI-generated code , developers are experimenting with agentic , fully autonomous
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