Cognito-owner Vectra comes to Australia

Network threat detection vendor Vectra, best known for its Cognito platform, has entered the Asia-Pacific market, calling Sydney its regional home.

The region will be led by Kevin Vanhaelen, a security industry veteran and former Telstra and Dimension Data executive. Vanhaelen worked at Dimension Data Australia for 16 years, most recently as national manager of its security practice before his departure in December 2016.

He went on to join Telstra’s global security solutions business, being promoted to head of strategy and operations in July 2018 before leaving 15 months later.

In the new role, Vanhaelen is responsible for growing Vectra’s presence in the region, with a focus on channel strategy and winning over new enterprise customers.

Vectra’s Cognito platform uses AI to automate manual processes typically involved in threat detection, providing visibility into cloud, data centre, end-user and IoT environments, which Vectra stated in a press release can reduce security operations workloads by 37 times.

The company recently announced a partnership to natively run Cognito in AWS environments to detect cyberthreats in the public cloud, featuring AWS Virtual Private Cloud traffic mirroring. In September 2018, Vectra also partnered with Microsoft to allow Cognito to run natively in Azure, with virtual sensors integrated with the Azure Virtual Network Terminal Access Point.

Vectra said in a press release that the decision to establish its APAC headquarters in Sydney was to cater for the increasing demand for Cognito. The company recently closed a US$100 million Series E funding round to help fund the expansion.

“Our recent funding, coupled with our rapid growth in the global security market, uniquely positions Vectra to earn significant business in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Vanhaelen.

“We’re delivering a disruptive new approach that enables security operations teams to detect and respond faster than ever to cyberthreats so that enterprise organisations and managed detection and response providers can stop catastrophic data breaches.”