IBM pitches security system to Phl firms

MANILA, Philippines – Global technology giant IBM said security will continue to be a major concern in the Philippines with the ongoing digital transformation of large firms and small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Luis Pineda, IBM Philippines president and country general manager, said this digital transformation remains a bright prospect for the multinational, especially with its IBM Security which delivers an integrated system of analytics, real-time defenses and proven experts.

“This has been a big issue here in the Philippines because a lot of companies are going through digital transformation- changing from paper-based process to digital process, and so are opening up their channels,” Pineda told reporters in a recent media briefing.

“Not only are they making their (point-of-sales) more sophisticated and more able to do things for their customers, they’re also opening up channels, such as internet, mobile  and other businesses such as electronic interchanges with other businesses as well. This opens up vulnerabilities,” Pineda said.

“If you go through digital transformation, without having a security underpinning, that’s a big problem. Because you just opened up all these portals in their company and then you haven’t taken care of the basics, it will be a big problem for you and the company,” Pineda said.

This is the reason, Pineda said, for IBM to actively engage with local companies –from banks, to insurance companies and retail companies.

“The good thing is IBM has a dominant position in security. We’ve been doing security since security was invented. So, we’re  the only company that has an end-to-end solution around security,” Pineda said.

“There’s a lot of niche players here in the Philippines. But nobody can bring it all together, end-to-end like IBM can because we have not only our capability in data security networks, end point security, we have threat intelligence. we can actually build an entire security operations center,” Pineda said.

Pineda pointed out the numbers of cyber-criminals all over the world seemed to increase, and is becoming more determined and even inventive in their cyber-hacking efforts.

He said IBM was also tapping their Watson artificial intelligence or cognitive computing power to monitor hacking activities.

“Watson is now helping. We have a team in IBM, it’s called X-Force, their job is go through the web, go through the Dark Web, to find vulnerabilities,” Pineda said.

“It’s a very manual process. We have thousands of people doing that in IBM,” Pineda said.

“Now Watson is actually going out there on the Dark Web and itself finding these security vulnerabilities, and problems that it can pull from that database,” Pineda said.

“Because new threats are being created every single day probably every single hour, we need to be faster and better than the criminals. We’re applying Watson to be faster and better than the criminals so that it can really get the security intelligence without having to go through manual means,” Pineda said.

“But security intelligence is useless if companies don’t use it. So we’re also helping companies use the security intelligence, putting their infrastructure in place, putting the foundation in place and we actually have people that can run that for them, take advantage of that security intelligence and prevent these problems from happening,” Pineda said.