NEW YORK, Feb. 6, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Agio, a leading provider of cybersecurity and managed IT services for the financial services industry, has announced a formal partnership with Respond Software, the cybersecurity platform that automates decision-making by emulating human reasoning. 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. Thirty-seven percent of C-suite security executives at large enterprises worldwide receive more than 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%.

Operating as a virtual expert security analyst alongside 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. Its 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," explained Mike Armistead, CEO and co-founder at Respond Software. "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.

"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 in this fashion, the technology can analyze real incidents over shorter timeframes, while automatically escalating prominent threats to incident response and remediation teams at lower cost. 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 such as cluster analysis to find hidden patterns and insights that will increase incident response efficiency.

"This partnership is a testament to Agio's unique application of people, process and technology," explained Schawacker. "As a service organization first and foremost, we're constantly evaluating the market for new technology innovations to fuel the improvement and quality of service delivery to our clients. In Respond, we've found a partner that immediately enhances our MDR offering by unearthing insights that humans alone cannot uncover and ensuring faster customer response." 

About Agio
Agio is a hybrid cybersecurity and managed IT organization equipping financial services, health care and payments enterprises with best-in-breed cyber protection and technology support. Specifically across the alternative investment space, Agio has extensive experience building, maintaining, optimizing and securing IT infrastructure for the world's most prestigious hedge fund, private equity, and asset management firms. With more than 250 employees, our culture prioritizes frequent and timely communication to provide unrivaled service across all of our solutions including managed detection and response, 360° cybersecurity programs, virtual CISO (vCISO) support, technology hosting, monitoring, management, helpdesk, disaster prevention and recovery. Agio is headquartered in New York, NY, with additional offices in San Francisco, CA, Raleigh, NC and Norman, OK. For more information, please visit www.agio.com.

Press Contact
Aidan O'Connor | Prosek Partners
646.818.9283
aoconnor@prosek.com

SOURCE Agio

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