Wrapped in Security: Cybersecurity Has Changed Forever

Look at today’s news headlines and you’ll find technology is front and center.

Whether it’s artificial intelligence, blockchain, connected cars, mobile payments, drones, 5G, you name it – tech is making a tremendous impact on society. A proliferation of new tech at various stages of development is already, or poised to, play a big role in how we live and work.

This next-generation tech is transporting us into a new, brighter future and cybersecurity is the linchpin keeping the wheels moving forward.

In 2017, Gartner said there were an estimated 8.4 billion connected “things” around the world. That number is only going up. As we connect more people, places and things to the Internet and each other – cyber criminals are finding new ways to hack more things.

With a tech-driven future full of possibility hinging on virtually seamless and highly secure connectivity, the time is now to commit to upping cybersecurity defenses. That is why we’re wrapping cybersecurity into everything we do at AT&T and helping our business customers to do the same.

AT&T Business is one of the leading managed security services providers in the world and we’re only getting stronger after this week’s news that we finalized our acquisition of AlienVault.

This is going to benefit all our security customers, but specifically small and medium-sized organizations. Because here’s the reality – we’re seeing a big uptick in the number of small to medium-sized businesses that are being hit with cyber attacks. And unfortunately, these businesses many times lack the expertise and resources needed to protect their business and their customers.

We want to help address this issue. And now, together with AlienVault, we will be able to give them access to the types of actionable threat intelligence and cybersecurity protections that large enterprises use. 

 A second important element of where cybersecurity is headed is the move from managing cyber threats to predicting them.

At AT&T, we already have the technologies and services that organizations need to prevent, detect and respond to ever-evolving cyber threats. Now, with AlienVault, we are better-positioned for the next wave of predictive cybersecurity which brings artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to life by unifying an organization’s security tools with threat intelligence.

Some of these capabilities already exist for large business through our AT&T Threat Manager. Threat Manager looks at information moving across the public Internet, data from a business’ own network and combines it with intelligence derived from multiple sources to allow business to predict threats they would have otherwise missed.

AlienVault ups the ante by advancing these capabilities and extending them to all businesses regardless of size thanks to their automation and self-discovery technologies.

We also announced we’re creating a new cybersecurity division within AT&T Business. This dedicated division will focus on our vision to scale our extensive cybersecurity capabilities and technologies to make security innovation accessible to all businesses, of any size, around the globe.

Leading this group will be Barmak Meftah, who is now president of AT&T Cybersecurity Solutions and CEO of AlienVault. Combining the cybersecurity expertise of his team with our AT&T Cybersecurity Solutions leadership opens new avenues for us to innovate and serve new customers in new ways.

The new entity will help us unlock the full potential of our advanced threat intelligence with the broader ecosystem of cybersecurity solutions and AT&T’s world-class network data flow visibility to better protect businesses.

It’s clear that the cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving. We’re showing we’re serious about evolving with it.