Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Following the acquisition of leading cybersecurity service provider Coordinates Middle East last month, Gulf Business Machines (GBM) has announced the launch of GBM Shield, its most comprehensive cybersecurity offering to date. With October recognized as Cybersecurity Awareness Month globally, GBM Shield was introduced to regional organizations at the flagship GBM Security Summit held in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi earlier this week, thus marking a new chapter in cyber defense for the region.

Developed to address evolving security challenges that regional organizations face due to the sophisticated threat landscape, the GBM Shield cyber defense program taps into GBM’s extensive experience and local know-how, while also providing 24/7 access to GBM’s uniquely skilled team of security professionals. In a holistic approach to cybersecurity, the program is risk-driven rather than technology-driven, thus enhancing existing technologies within an organization to elevate its security and cyber resiliency and increase the returns on security investment.

Last month, GBM had announced the acquisition of majority shares of Coordinates Middle East, a regional Managed Detection & Response firm headquartered in Dubai. GBM Shield will be powered by Cor., Coordinates’ innovative platform that enables integration, automation, and orchestration across any technology to provide defense-grade services to enterprises of all sizes.

GBM’s annual cybersecurity report released earlier this year highlighted how redesigning security for the digital-first world and protecting it from external and internal threats has become a key priority for organizations. These insights mirror findings from last year’s GBM Security Report which reported that securing data had become essential to building trust with customers, with 84% of those surveyed wanting to invest in data security this year. GBM Shield brings together the best of GBM’s advance cybersecurity portfolio and its three decades of experience to offer an integrated program that is vendor-agnostic and can be easily scaled up or down based on the needs of the customer.