Darktrace, the leader in Enterprise Immune System technology for cyber security, today announced strong business momentum in Asia-Pacific with a 600 percent increase of deployments in the region from July to September 2016. To further promote its self-learning technology to local organizations, Darktrace will be participating as part of a select group in the UK Department for International Trade’s ‘Singapore International Cyber Week’ trade mission this week.

Darktrace continues to build its partner network across the region with Samsung SDS; telco giant Telstra; and India’s leading solutions integrator company, AGC Networks; all recently becoming resellers and distributors.

Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System now has 200 deployments in Asia-Pacific and latest regional customers include major communications company, M1 Limited; regional info-communications service provider, TeleChoice International; the United World College of South East Asia (UWCSEA), an independent international school in Singapore; Ramada and Days Hotels Singapore At Zhongshan Park; a Singapore-based printing company; a top 10 law firm in Australia; a leading bank in New Zealand, and an elite high technology firm in Japan.

“With an increasingly complex cyber security landscape and a substantial rise in inside threat, perimeter defenses are no longer enough to protect the network. Organizations are waking-up to the fact that a different approach is needed and are seeking intelligent technologies to stay ahead of the evolving threat,”said Sanjay Aurora, Managing Director, APAC, Darktrace. “Using advanced maths and machine learning, Darktrace is responding to growing demand and has doubled the size of its regional team across nine offices, providing customers with access and counsel from local cyber experts.”

Darktrace has been selected to participate in the UK Department for International Trade’s Singapore International Cyber Week trade mission, and will also be part of this week’s GovWare 2016 and Cloud Expo Asia conventions. This will also include a visit to Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) to showcase its technology.

Ahead of the trade mission, Sanjay Aurora shares two key cyber security observations for organizations from recent months:

1. Cloud Services and SaaS Applications Increases the Scope for Threat Actors and Security Operators

In 2016, Asia-Pacific organizations have continued to embrace the latest virtual tools, especially cloud-based systems. The region’s public cloud services market is on pace to grow 12.8 percent in 2016 to total US$8.11 billion, up from US$7.19 billion in 2015

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. SaaS is also the fastest growth segment of the public cloud services market in the Asia-Pacific region, with a projected growth rate of 22.5 percent and a revenue projection of US$1.67 billion

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SaaS applications from the likes of Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft have allowed firms to optimize resource utilization and streamline processes to improve customer experience, reduce costs, and generate revenue in new markets. However, this has also created significant blind spots for security operators, with critical data and user interactions often falling out of sight.

“SaaS applications allow employees the luxury of working anytime and anywhere. This is crucial when we consider the mobility preferences of the millennial workforce and how quickly small- and medium-sized businesses across Asia-Pacific are looking to scale. However, this also means that user logins, data transfers and downloads over less secure home networks or public Wi-Fi increases the scope for threats to propagate,” said Sanjay Aurora.

“40 percent of all enterprise workloads are already running in public or private clouds, with nearly one-quarter of all workloads expected to run over SaaS applications by 2018

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. At the same time, the recent Dropbox hack highlights a pressing need for firms to invest in security technology that provides full and real time visibility over these critical, yet commonly-unmonitored areas of the infrastructure,” added Sanjay Aurora.

2. Growing IoT Adoption Means Lapses in Security Can Have Serious Offline Consequences

Asia-Pacific organizations are often unaware of all the latent cyber risks in their business operations, which is illustrated by the fact that in every organization where Darktrace has been deployed, the technology has identified previously unknown threats. This will be exacerbated by the growth of IoT, which is set to see the number of connected devices across the region increase from 3.1 billion to 8.6 billion by 2020

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“Most organizations do not recognize the true breadth of their digital businesses. When we first install our technology on our customer networks, the first realization is often that the number of connected devices has been grossly underestimated. This can be due to existing connections to devices of employees who have left the company, or the failure to factor in connections to non-standard devices, like air conditioning, biometric sensors or printers,” said Sanjay Aurora.

At one company in Asia, for example, Darktrace detected that a fingerprint scanner used for access to a building was connecting to the internet in an unexpected way. Cyber-attackers had been exploiting a published security vulnerability in the fingerprint sensor to upload data that would have given them physical access to the building if the exploit had remained undetected. Through the biometric sensor, the attacker had also installed malware on the system that they planned to use to establish a foothold in the organization’s IT network.

“Organizations must now monitor everything that is going on in a digital enterprise and look for the unexpected. This can be challenging due to the sheer scale of the network and the number of connected devices. Instead of falling victim to complexity, businesses need to adopt an ‘immune system’ approach to cyber security and gain full visibility of their network using machine learning to spot cyber-threats early, before they do financial or reputational damage,” added Sanjay Aurora.

Powered by advanced mathematics and unsupervised machine learning technology developed by specialists from the University of Cambridge, Darktrace detects and defends against unidentified cyber-threats on the network in real time.

1 Gartner. Gartner Says Public Cloud Services in Mature Asia/Pacific Forecast to Reach $8.1 Billion in 2016.
2 Gartner. Gartner Says Public Cloud Services in Mature Asia/Pacific Forecast to Reach $8.1 Billion in 2016.
3 451 Research. Enterprise IT Executives Expect 60 Percent of Workloads Will Run in the Cloud by 2018.
4 IDC Asia-Pacific. Asia-Pacific Becomes the Frontline for IoT, with Industry to Connect 8.6 Billion Things and Create an USD583 Billion Market Opportunity by 2020.

About Darktrace

Darktrace is a world-leading cyber-threat defense company. Its multi-award-winning Enterprise Immune System technology automatically detects and responds to emerging threats, powered by machine learning and mathematics developed by specialists from the University of Cambridge. Without using rules or signatures, Darktrace models the ‘pattern of life’ of every device, user and network within an organization, identifying and mitigating cyber-threats before damage is done. Darktrace’s self-learning technology has been deployed globally and across all sectors, including energy, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, financial services and healthcare. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and Cambridge, UK, with over 20 global offices including London, New York, Milan, Mumbai, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.