Greater risk for telcos from advancing tech, threats : Etisalat SL IT head

Advances in technology as well as higher sophistication in terms of threats are resulting in greater risks for local telecommunications companies, according to Priyankara Perera, Head of IT for the Sri Lankan unit of celco Etisalat.

Mr. Perera made this comment, according to a statement, at a recently-concluded seminar on "Situational Awareness in Information Security", which was jointly hosted by local IT company South Asian Technologies, and top global IT security player McAfee. Featuring over 100 local Chief Information Officers ( CIOs), Chief Security Officers (CSOs) and IT managers, the seminar was geared towards "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 statement further indicated.

Elaborating, Mr. Perera also added; "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".

The statement also described the McAfee ESM as "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 bil- lions of events from multiple years— presenting query results in seconds, not hours. To help place events in context for your 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 that you value most, as threats and vulnerabilities evolve".

The statement also quoted South Asian Technologies Chief Executive Sanjaya Padmaperuma as commenting; "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 fulfill these requirements of Sri Lankan organisations, without them having to invest in additional resources for this exercise".