Latest news with #Squadcast
TECHx
05-05-2025
- Business
- TECHx
Interview with Abdul Rehman Tariq Butt at SolarWinds
Home » Interview Of The Week » Everyone's Talking About AI. But Is Anyone Getting It Right? Abdul Rehman Tariq Butt, Regional Director – Middle East at SolarWinds, shares insights in this exclusive interview on the company's strategic direction in the region, innovations showcased at GISEC, and how SolarWinds is helping organizations tackle modern cybersecurity challenges with intelligence and agility. How does SolarWinds' participation at GISEC align with its broader strategic goals in the Middle East? As a leading cybersecurity focused exhibition, participating in GISEC enables us to showcase solutions that are helping redefine the digital landscape in UAE and beyond. It is also the ideal platform for us to engage with IT professionals from organizations of all industries and sizes that are looking for solutions to help manage their IT environments faster, address today's security challenges, and maximise the overall value IT provides to the business. Can you share any new product introductions, collaborations, or key announcements SolarWinds is unveiling at GISEC? Our portfolio is constantly evolving, and GISEC provides a great platform to highlight the latest innovations. Since our last appearance, we've made significant strides. We've expanded support to include a wider range of devices—especially SD-WAN nodes—to help customers accelerate their network modernisation efforts. We've also enhanced our multi-cloud capabilities with out-of-the-box support for Google Cloud Platform, alongside AWS and Azure. Most recently, in March, we strengthened our offering further with the acquisition of a solution focused on incident response and business continuity. What specific challenges do enterprise IT environments face today, and how is SolarWinds equipped to address them? AI is augmenting attacks that already plague organisanisations, making these more sophisticated and impactful. At SolarWinds, we're constantly horizon scanning, and enhancing our portfolio to address the greatest challenges and opportunities enterprises face. Most recently, we made a significant acquisition specifically in the incident response space by acquiring Squadcast and its incident response technology. This allows us to provide customers with intelligent incident response capabilities that significantly reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). With Squadcast, organizations have achieved up to a 68% reduction in MTTR, saving thousands of work hours and nearly half a million dollars in costs. In what ways is SolarWinds partnering with GCC governments and enterprises to strengthen cyber resilience? The pace of digital transformation across the Middle East is accelerating—and we're proud to be right at the heart of it. What we're seeing on the ground is that hybrid cloud has firmly established itself as the model of choice. Organisations are increasingly seeking the flexibility to run workloads either on-premises or in the cloud, depending on their operational, regulatory, or performance needs. Security, control, and agility remain top priorities. With our SolarWinds Observability platform, we give customers the freedom to operate across hybrid and multi-cloud environments—without compromising visibility. That kind of end-to-end insight is critical. Without it, organisations risk overlooking issues that can lead to performance bottlenecks, user dissatisfaction, or even downtime. Another trend we're watching closely is the rush toward AI adoption. While there's immense potential, one of the biggest challenges we see is that many organisations are still grappling with how to apply AI meaningfully. Too often, AI is positioned as a checkbox feature—something added on, rather than integrated with purpose. A vendor might say, 'We offer AI,' but the real question is: how does that translate into business value? At SolarWinds, we take a different approach. Our observability platform is built with AI by design—meaning our AIOps capabilities are embedded from the ground up, not bolted on after the fact. Using machine learning and holistic data insights, we help customers detect anomalies, pre-empt issues, and optimise system health across hybrid and cloud-native environments. Ultimately, we're enabling organisations to realise the true value of AI—empowering IT teams to do more with less, respond faster, and drive transformation with confidence. How do you view the current evolution of the cybersecurity threat landscape across the MEA region? We're seeing an uptick in the use of deepfakes and increasingly complex, multi-pronged attacks. While these tactics aren't entirely new, what's changed is the level of sophistication. Today's attackers are better resourced, continuously evolving, and leveraging AI-powered tools to refine their methods and maximise impact. It's a dynamic threat landscape that demands equally intelligent defence strategies.
Channel Post MEA
03-04-2025
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
New Enhancements Enable SolarWinds Tackle Modern IT Operational Resiliency Challenges
SolarWinds has announced the latest enhancements across its portfolio, which integrate expanded capabilities across observability, incident response, service management, and AI-powered automation. These enhancements empower IT teams to navigate complex hybrid environments, accelerate issue resolution, and ensure business continuity in an increasingly complex hybrid IT landscape. 'One of the biggest concerns we hear from customers is how to stay resilient amid rapid technological advancements and economic pressures,' said Cullen Childress, Chief Product Officer at SolarWinds. 'Every new wave of change—from digital transformation to generative AI—feels like a storm threatening their business. They need solutions that not only help them adapt but also strengthen their ability to thrive in the face of disruption.' Solving the IT Operational Resiliency Challenge: The evolving IT environments offer flexibility, scalability, and cost advantages, but they also introduce new levels of complexity. Many IT teams are overwhelmed by: Alert overload – Excessive alerts and event noise obscure critical incidents. – Excessive alerts and event noise obscure critical incidents. Data silos – Fragmented data streams complicate root-cause identification. – Fragmented data streams complicate root-cause identification. Lengthy resolution processes– Inefficient workflows slow remediation and increase downtime risk. IT incidents can be severe—disrupting services, impacting revenue, eroding customer trust, and damaging brand reputation. The SolarWinds integrated portfolio of observability, incident response, and service management, powered by SolarWinds AI, addresses these challenges by correlating alerts, improving decision-making, and accelerating issue resolution. This unified approach enhances performance, availability, and control across complex hybrid IT ecosystems to deliver unmatched operational resilience. Key Enhancements Across the SolarWinds Portfolio: Squadcast Incident Response New to the SolarWinds portfolio, Squadcast Incident Response unites people, processes, and technology, providing a proactive, structured approach to incident response and resolution. Squadcast brings AI-powered alert isolation, on-call management, multi-source alert correlation, standardized runbooks, status pages, and Microsoft Teams and Slack integration for incident swarming, leading to faster issue identification so organizations can minimize downtime, reduce remediation time, and maintain operational resilience. SolarWinds Observability Now supports expanded hybrid IT awareness with deeper and broader single-pane-of-glass visibility across major cloud vendors, including GCP, AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments. These expanded capabilities help ensure a unified and detailed view of your entire hybrid IT environment, enabling proactive management and optimization. The AI-powered Log Insights feature surfaces critical insights from large volumes of log data, identifying patterns, anomalies, and trends that might indicate potential issues. This aids in proactive problem resolution and improves operational resilience by detecting issues before they become major incidents. Root Cause Assist leverages SolarWinds AI to help identify the underlying causes of problems or issues by analyzing data and providing rich, contextual insights. This function automates and accelerates the analysis of application performance issues. SolarWinds Database Observability Entering Tech Preview, SolarWinds AI Query Assist improves database queries by automatically analyzing query patterns and suggesting optimal query rewrites. This provides more accurate and efficient query optimization, helping DBAs improve efficiency and lower production costs caused by excessively long-running queries. SolarWinds Service Desk SolarWinds AI Runbook generation automates the manual and time-consuming task of compiling and formatting pre-written operational guides into new runbooks with standardized resolution processes that enhance operational efficiency and improve incident response times. Data masking improves an organization's compliance with governance and industry regulations of PII, PCI, and sensitive data by masking sensitive information and preventing inadvertent sharing. 'Learning and adapting, core pillars of operational resilience, have been at the heart of success for SolarWinds over the past 25 years,' said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO of SolarWinds. 'Our mission is to share that knowledge with our customers, equipping them with solutions that help them navigate the IT operational resiliency challenges of today and tomorrow's dynamic IT landscape.' Availability The new enhancements to the SolarWinds portfolio are available now, with deployment options tailored to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes. Whether you're a small business or a global enterprise, SolarWinds offers the flexibility to scale with your IT operations. 0 0
