- Agio, a leading provider of cybersecurity and managed IT services for the financial services industry, announced it signed a formal partnership with Respond Software
Agio — a leading provider of cybersecurity and managed IT services for the financial services industry — announced it signed a formal partnership with Respond Software. Respond Software is a cybersecurity platform that automates decision-making by emulating human reasoning. And as part of the affiliation, Agio will incorporate the firm’s Respond Analyst decision automation software into its Managed Detection & Response (MDR) suite of services.
“We have opted to partner with Respond Software’s proprietary decision engine, which replicates a security analyst’s judgment at unprecedented scale, speed and consistency,” said Peter Schawacker, Managing Director of Cybersecurity Operations at Agio. “The solution is a tremendous value-add for our clients, empowering our team of technical, cybersecurity, data privacy, and regulatory experts to deliver a faster, stronger and more consistent service as cyber-attacks increasingly become more frequent and complex.”
The sheer volume of data that enterprises create and ingest daily presents a major challenge for analysts tasked with monitoring, investigating security incidents, and navigating high numbers of false-positive alerts. And 37% percent of C-suite security executives at large enterprises worldwide receive over 10,000 alerts every month, of which 52% are time-consuming false positives and almost a quarter of respondents reported false-positive alert rates as high as 75%.
By operating as a virtual expert security analyst along with Agio’s SOAR solution stack, the Respond Analyst brings order to real-time monitoring and analysis, prioritizing threats based on numerous relevant factors to determine criticality and priority. The company’s Robotic Decision Automation (RDA) models are pre-trained by expert security analysts, incident responders and other cyber-specialists to detect and triage security events signaled by enterprise networks and endpoint sensors.
“Our sophisticated technology sets Agio apart from MDR and Managed Security industry competitors. Seventy-six percent of organizations cite growing threat sophistication, increasing employee workloads and a rapidly-growing attack surface area as major factors increasing the difficulty of effective threat detection and response,” added Mike Armistead, CEO and co-founder at Respond Software. “While larger organizations might be adopting machine learning to maximize performance in select tasks, Respond’s variation of artificial intelligence (AI) couples the intelligent decision-making of a security expert with the power, scale and speed of software. It’s like having a team of 25 super-efficient human security analysts who work around-the-clock to investigate every alert, determine their relevance, group them accordingly and only scale the ones that need attention.”
By eliminating false positives, the technology is able to analyze real incidents over shorter timeframes while automatically escalating prominent threats to incident response and remediation teams at lower cost. And once calibrated, the system does not require retraining or implementation of further rules and scripts. Its machine learning algorithm draws inferences from datasets, using techniques like cluster analysis to find hidden patterns and insights that will increase incident response efficiency.
