SecurityMEA speaks with Amit Roy, EVP & Regional Head –EMEA at Paladion about the launch of the region’s first AI driven Security Operations Center (SOC) located in Dubai and the advantages that an artificial intelligence driven SOC offers in combating cyber security.
What is Paladion’s AI-driven Security Operations Centre (SOC)?
Our AI-driven SOC is a comprehensive MDR service that is powered by our artificial intelligence platform called AI.saac. This platform continuously analyses an organisation’s data to detect attacks in real time and offers faster response to remediate these threats. We call our AI driven SOC as the Paladion MDR Command Center and it is managed by highly skilled cyber security professionals, who further analyse the threat report generated by the AI platform to uncover the vulnerabilities and address them to remediate threats in a matter of minutes, rather than months.
What prompted you to open an AI-driven SOC in Dubai?
The frequency and sophistication of cyber-attacks continues to rise, and this region has especially fallen victim to targeted attacks. Although, hackers have already employed AI and machine learning capabilities to increase the intensity and sophistication of their attacks but for the cyber security industry AI is still a new concept. This gap between cyber criminals and security shield of companies is exposing them further and making them more vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Hence we saw the need to go beyond the traditional methods to counter these advanced persistent threats and decided to introduce AI in cyber security by launching our ‘AI-driven SOC’ in the region. We feel this is the right time for us to launch such a facility that can match or even surpass the methods adopted by cyber criminals.
What are the advantages of using artificial intelligence in your command center?
By using artificial intelligence we are able to address 3 major industry challenges that organizations are facing today in the region including the risk of unknown attacks, cutting down on the response time and prioritizing on the vulnerabilities to address threats accordingly.
This platform automatically detects patterns in threats and sends the most relevant alerts to Paladion’s skilled data scientists and threat hunters who then decide which one is actually a threat and which ones are false positives. In this way, AI automates the process to sift through the data and provides the intelligence to security professionals that help them to identify and act on real threats even faster.
On a daily basis the platform takes feeds from across the globe to analyse which vulnerabilities have exploits available. As an example, out of 10,000 vulnerabilities, only about 1000 have exploits available that hackers can leverage to initiate an attack. By employing artificial intelligence in our SOC, the platform prioritizes such vulnerabilities and highlights those vulnerabilities on priority basis, rather than wasting time and efforts on the other 9000.
Which are your targeted customers that will benefit from this SOC?
With the rise in cyber attacks, cyber security is no longer a dire need for just large enterprises. Today, even mid-market and small businesses are exposed to such attacks, since they have also started generating and processing sizeable amount of data. However, this segment is challenged by limited resources to invest in the right technology and skill-sets. With this initiative to setup a regional command center based in Dubai, we are expanding our focus from enterprise class customers to embrace the mid-market and SME segment who can advantage of highly skilled human analysts backed by an AI-driven platform.
Paladion has a network of SOCs spread across the globe and our Dubai SOC is also connected to rest of SOCs in the world that not only helps it to collate regional data but also refer to the global threat intelligence to provide the region with advanced and next level of protection.
How can mid-market and SMEs gain from your move to embrace this sector?
With the advancement in technology and the development of our AI driven MDR platform, today we are in a much better position to serve the mid-market and small businesses. We are now able to offer cloud-ready services to this segment with easy payment options like ‘pay-as-you-grow’, which eliminates the need for large investments by these companies. And besides investments in products and solutions, these companies now don’t need to worry about skilled manpower to manage their security infrastructure 24×7. As part of our managed security services we not just provide updated technology but also offer our pool of skilled staff to manage their security 24×7, enabling them to not just save on capital expenditure but also on operating expenses.
What is the main differentiating factor from other managed service providers?
It is important today that cyber security be both pragmatic and proactive, which we aim to achieve through our latest AI-powered MDR command center in Dubai making us the first AI driven SOC in the region. For us, the biggest differentiating factor is deploying AI that allows us to detect deeper and respond faster to threats. Also, we have not restricted ourselves and gone beyond threat management with our platform to do vulnerability management as well.