McAfee and South Asian Technologies host seminar on situational awareness in information security

McAfee and South Asian Technologies recently hosted a successful intelligent security event in Colombo with the participation of over 100 CIOs, CSOs and IT managers from Sri Lanka. This event was aimed at educating audiences on utilising situational awareness technologies to get real time actionable insight out of their security systems, thereby enabling organisations to make proactive and intelligent security decisions.

The event flagged off with Jagdish Mahapatra, Managing Director, McAfee – India and SAARC elaborating on the need for a connected security strategy and a robust situational analysis framework among organisations in Sri Lanka.

South Asian Technologies also announced that Etisalat Lanka has deployed McAfee Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), one of McAfee’s key situational awareness solution offerings in the SIEM segment; ushering the telecom service provider into the league of progressive organisations adopting next-generation security solutions.

Speaking at the event, Sanjaya Padmaperuma, Chief Executive Officer, South Asian Technologies said: “With the influx of mature cyber-attacks, information security has become a big data analytics issue demanding CIOs to have better visibility on the adversarial actions in their security systems and predict future attacks. We believe that McAfee’s solutions are well placed to fulfil these requirements of Sri Lankan organisations, without them having to invest in additional resources for this exercise.”

Mahapatra said: “Sri Lanka is among our strategic and fast-growing markets in the Asia Pacific region and we are glad to have a strong partner in South Asian Technologies. Jointly with their team, we are pleased to support Etisalat in its journey of being a frontrunner in adopting next-generation security practices.”  

Commenting on the implementation, Priyankara Perera, Head of IT, Etisalat Sri Lanka, said: “Technology advances and sophistication of threats are putting telecom service providers at greater risk. In the context of these new realities, we are happy to be among the early adopters to use situational awareness technologies to gain our competitive edge. We believe that the McAfee ESM solution will enable us to have enterprise-wide visibility to identify threats and suspicious activities to take prompt, pre-emptive actions.”

McAfee ESM is an enterprise-class security information and event management system (SIEM) that identifies, correlates, and remediates threats. Like other SIEMs, McAfee ESM collects logs, events, and data from the various appliances and software running your IT infrastructure. However, the speed and capacity of McAfee ESM separates it from other SIEMs. For example, organisations can collect all the logs from all the data sources they want to monitor, correlate events, and report on months of data in less than 10 seconds.

For historical analysis, the system can process billions of events from multiple years— presenting query results in seconds, not hours. To help place events in context for an organisation, McAfee Global Threat Intelligence feeds real-time threat data into the McAfee ESM correlation engine, while McAfee Risk Advisor feeds in asset valuation data. The system can then show you the data related to the assets valued most, as threats and vulnerabilities evolve.

South Asian Technologies (SAT) plays the role of master distributor in Sri Lanka for McAfee products. SAT is primarily a value added distributor of world-class IT products and specialises in the distribution of internet security solutions and high availability software solutions. SAT has strong partnerships with leading IT companies in the world combined with a strong channel and skilled and experienced support team.