Australian businesses navigating an increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape are discovering significant operational efficiencies through the adoption of artificial intelligence-powered solutions. A prominent example is Quorum, an IT services provider which has partnered with Microsoft to revolutionize how organizations respond to cyber threats. By leveraging Microsoft’s Security Copilot, Quorum is helping customers dramatically reduce alert fatigue, streamline threat triage, and proactively enhance their security posture.
The Growing Challenge of Cybersecurity Alert Overload
The digital transformation of the modern workplace has led to an exponential rise in cyber threats, ranging from credential-based attacks to intricate phishing campaigns. For many Australian organizations, security operations centers (SOCs) face a relentless barrage of low-quality or false-positive alerts, making it nearly impossible to distinguish real threats from background noise in real-time.A typical enterprise may encounter hundreds of automated alerts daily—each of which could signify a genuine intrusion or merely stem from benign user behavior or system quirks. Sorting through this overwhelming volume of notifications exacts a heavy toll on limited human resources, induces alert fatigue, and increases the risk of missing critical security incidents. According to industry analysts, poor alert management is a root cause of delayed breach detection in a significant share of Australian data breach disclosures.
Quorum and the Rise of AI-Powered Security Automation
In response to this challenge, Quorum has strategically embraced AI-driven solutions, using Microsoft Security Copilot to act as a force multiplier for in-house and outsourced security teams. Security Copilot, an advanced generative AI tool, is specifically engineered to ingest massive volumes of security event data, correlate signals, and generate natural language summaries or responses to operator queries.Daniel Tracey, Quorum’s Principal Consultant for Cybersecurity, outlined the deployment at the recent CyberSecure Summit in Sydney. For one large organization previously handling approximately 300 alerts per day, integrating Security Copilot into the incident response workflow resulted in a radical reduction. “What we did is we designed some prompts to say ‘Security Copilot, go and retrieve this information for us,’” Tracey explained. This custom prompt engineering, in tandem with Microsoft Sentinel’s automation capabilities, enabled operators to create logic and build workflows in plain English—eliminating the need for complex scripting.
The result: Of the daily 300 alerts, only about 35 required direct attention from security analysts. The rest were confidently de-escalated based on Security Copilot’s natural language assessments and evidence gathering—a staggering near-90% reduction in daily manual triage workload.
Automating “Impossible Travel” Investigations
A particularly acute challenge addressed by Quorum’s solution relates to “impossible travel” alerts—cases where an employee’s credentials appear to be used from widely separated geographic locations within an implausible timeframe. For organizations with mobile or remote workforces, such alerts are both common and time-consuming to investigate.Previously, security teams were forced to manually cross-reference travel logs, VPN records, and authentication histories to determine whether such alerts reflected genuine threats or were benign anomalies (e.g., legitimate employee travel, VPN re-routing). By integrating Security Copilot, Quorum automated the evidence collection and decision-making process: the AI agent could instantly review the contextual data and recommend whether each alert was likely to be a real threat or a false positive.
Daniel Tracey noted that “99.9% of the time, it was a false positive”—underscoring both the inefficiency of manual processes and the critical importance of intelligent automation. The net effect was to resolve a substantial portion of the level-one SOC investigation burden, freeing analysts to focus on high-impact issues.
The Double-Edged Sword: AI as Both Enabler and Risk
While the operational case for generative AI in cybersecurity is compelling, experts caution that its adoption introduces new risks and governance challenges. Oscar Gonzalez, Microsoft’s SMB Cybersecurity Lead for Australia and New Zealand, emphasized that AI can inadvertently over-expose sensitive organizational data if employed without robust permissions and classification structures in place.“Generative AI use can over-expose data,” Gonzalez warned, stressing the imperative of having disciplined data classification and permission management before deploying tools such as Security Copilot or M365 Copilot. In environments characterized by high regulatory scrutiny and frequent breach disclosures, even a single instance of unintended data exposure can have severe reputational, financial, and legal consequences.
Gonzalez also flagged the risk of internal threats—where disgruntled employees or even accidental sharing could lead to data leaks. To mitigate these, he advocated for a comprehensive data governance approach, encompassing not only technology but also policy, culture, and audit controls.
Case Study: Elevating Data Security Maturity for an Australian Electrical Wholesaler
Quorum’s real-world impact is illustrated through its work with a Melbourne-based electrical wholesaler. Gavin van Niekerk, Quorum’s Practice Manager for Cybersecurity, described how the company began with an underdeveloped data security posture, lacking any proactive monitoring or established incident response protocols.The engagement kicked off with a deep-dive assessment, designed to map existing maturity, identify business-critical data, and customize interventions to the wholesaler’s operational realities. “The first thing is about bringing in experts who can listen to the company—how do we fit into the business requirements and not only effect change but also reduce the risk profile appropriately?” van Niekerk recounted.
Through targeted assessments and collaborative planning, Quorum equipped the client with ongoing monitoring capabilities, leveraging its modern Security Operations Center (Cyber One). The result was not a one-off improvement but the beginning of a sustainable security journey. “They felt empowered. They now have the confidence to consume AI with a reasonable level of data security in place,” van Niekerk added.
Crucially, the intervention was candidly described as the first step—not an endpoint. “Were they done? No, it was the first step in their journey, but now they could…consume the tooling effectively, without overexposing themselves to risk.”
Critical Analysis: Transformative Benefits and Persistent Caution
Major Advantages
- Dramatic Time Savings and Productivity Gains: As demonstrated, AI-driven triage can cut noise by over 80%, allowing SOC analysts to focus on true positives and proactively refine their defense posture.
- Improved Morale and Talent Retention: By automating tedious and repetitive tasks, AI reduces burnout and improves job satisfaction—key in a sector facing chronic skills shortages.
- Scalable Human-AI Collaboration: With human-imposed logic and oversight, operators can build custom workflows atop security automation platforms—creating tailored, scalable solutions that fit differing risk profiles.
- Accelerated Incident Response: By quickly filtering out false positives, teams can react faster to genuine threats, reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), two metrics highly correlated with breach impact.
Notable Risks and Governance Challenges
- Potential for Data Overexposure: Generative AI’s ability to surface and summarize large datasets means that improper permissioning, inadequate classification, or misconfigured access controls could lead to sensitive information being inadvertently exposed, either internally or externally.
- Dependence on Vendor Ecosystems: Organizations tightly coupled to Microsoft’s AI stack may find themselves exposed if licensing models, API availability, or security baselines change. Vendor lock-in and continuity planning must be considered.
- Misinterpretation or Automation-Driven Blind Spots: AI systems can suffer from flaws in their underlying models or logic, leading to missed or misclassified threats, especially if not regularly tuned against emerging attack vectors.
- Security of the AI Tools Themselves: Adversaries may attempt to exploit, poison, or reverse-engineer generative AI platforms, potentially gaining insight into incident response playbooks or manipulating classifications.
- Need for Continuous Policy and Human Oversight: No AI-driven solution is “set and forget”; best practices require ongoing review of automated processes, human validation of outcomes, regular audit, and a clear escalation path for novel or critical threats.
Cultural and Strategic Implications
Quorum’s consultants underscore that AI deployment in cybersecurity is as much a cultural shift as a technological one. Successful organizations embed AI-driven tools within a broader context of staff education, governance, and organizational learning. This involves:- Building a shared understanding of data value and risk across business and technology stakeholders.
- Ensuring clear communication around the capabilities and limits of automation.
- Encouraging continuous improvement and vigilance against complacency as automation becomes normalized.
How to Maximize Value from AI in Cybersecurity: Best Practices
For Australian businesses contemplating or actively undertaking the automation journey, several practical steps stand out:- Conduct a Security Maturity Assessment: Map your current incident response, data classification, and monitoring landscape before introducing AI. Understand not just technological gaps but cultural readiness to embrace automation.
- Start with High-Impact, Routine Workflows: Focus early AI deployment on repetitive, high-volume workflows—like alert triage or impossible travel monitoring—where time savings are both most measurable and least risky.
- Implement Strict Data Classification and Access Controls: Protect sensitive data by ensuring only the right people or systems have access. Use tools that enforce least-privilege principles and generate comprehensive audit trails.
- Keep Human Analysts in the Loop: AI is an enhancer, not a replacement, for skilled security professionals. Maintain human validation for escalated incidents and ensure clear escalation pathways for ambiguous cases.
- Continuously Review, Tune, and Educate: Use analytics to review automation accuracy, false positive/negative rates, and model drift. Train staff to work alongside AI, focusing on their highest-value analytical and judgment-based roles.
- Plan for Evolving Threats and Technologies: AI and threat actors are locked in an ever-evolving contest. Choose vendors and partners who commit to transparency, regular updates, and customer-driven roadmap adjustments.
The Bottom Line: AI-Driven Security, If Deployed Wisely
The evidence from early adopters like Quorum and their clients is clear: when thoughtfully deployed, AI-driven solutions such as Microsoft Security Copilot can unlock transformative reductions in operational workload, reduce risk exposure, and empower security teams to work more effectively. However, these advances come with the non-negotiable requirement for robust governance, sophisticated data management, and a culture of continuous vigilance.Australian businesses considering AI in cybersecurity should see it as both a shield and a catalyst. It is a shield—augmenting defense while freeing up skilled staff. It is a catalyst—accelerating digital transformation and risk-informed decision-making. But it is not a replacement for sound policy, experienced personnel, or strategic foresight. As threat actors increasingly leverage automation and AI themselves, a proactive but cautious approach will be essential for organizations determined not just to keep pace, but to maintain trust, resilience, and operational excellence in an unpredictable cyber landscape.
Source: iTnews Quorum using AI to achieve “huge” cyber time savings for Australian businesses