Organizations these days depend on several business relations in order to receive expert and trusted solutions to ensure their business continuity. Similarly, in the cyber world, as the security industry rapidly evolves to a newer phase, organizations are faced with the challenge of managing multifarious security and operational systems from different providers. Also, gathering data from disparate sources presents an even greater challenge of mining and making sense of all the data, which ends up being a laborious, expensive and a time-consuming process. Businesses today are on the lookout for holistic solutions that can manage the integration of various components like technology, procedures, and other security operations all under a single platform. This was the very reason that sparked the inception of Israel based Octopus Systems.

Tal Bar-Or, a former Israeli government security services officer and global corporate security and risk consultant along with Baruch Tagori, cyber expert and risk consultant, the founders of Octopus Systems were thinking way ahead of their time in devising a platform that can simply eliminate complex, tedious business operations. Having identified the dearth of a simple, unified platform that can cut across and integrate multiple security systems and data sources sparked the birth of Octopus Systems in 2013.  The invaluable experience they gained during their professional tenure, coupled with the in-depth expertise in handling security and risks in their respective domains made way for a single system – a system with many arms which are controlled from one brain, as the narrative of Octopus Systems goes.

The firm’s Physical Security Information Management (PSIM), recognized by many, is a revolutionary solution that integrates a comprehensive security management software with a robust smartphone application to help manage any untoward incident anywhere, anytime. The PSIM Command and Control center unifies disparate security devices and data systems into one platform thus helping organizations oversee and act immediately upon any abnormalities or incidents.

Octopus’ SOC “fusion center” platform integrates and correlates cybersecurity systems, physical security technologies, IoT based components and devices and brings it under one unified system. This system hugely benefits the Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Physical security and crisis management officers within the organization as they are benefitted from a unified security management platform. In the recent times, there have been repeated incidents of poor security practices across organizations. Weak passwords, poor awareness/knowledge on data protection, lack of patching and employees being aloof on security practices and information are all causing gradual yet significant damage to organizations each day. All these significantly increase the risk factor within an organization, making the job of a CISO more challenging.

Octopus’ System having realized this dearth, helps bridge the gap between the cyber realm and the physical world, bringing security insights, improving situational awareness, and correlating the data coming from each type of system. By doing this, the firm provides the SOC with a unified response platform and advanced interoperability. Embedded with automated actions, the response platform includes procedures and guidelines for governance and standardization and is completely ready and armed to respond to any type of incident happening in the organization and its sites. For the CISOs a complete transparency is availed on each asset, technologies, incidents, and staff across the organizations spread across various locations through Octopus’ converged security platform. Security officers are also notified on any event occurring within the organization regardless of their location through a native mobile application. Today, the firm integrates more than 200 types of third-party security systems, including physical security and IoT. The various facets that Octopus covers include video surveillance systems, video analytics, face recognition, license plate recognition, access control, PBAX phone switches, radars, drones along metering technology that includes power and water metering, public transport. The integration also reaches to a number of security systems such as anti-malware systems, intrusion detection systems, and intrusion prevention systems extending to firewalls, anti-virus agents, agentless systems, loggers and active directory events.

One of Israel’s top bank has been the beneficiaries of Octopus’ fusion center platform for the SOC. The financial institution was facing several issues including lack of compliance, fraudulence risks, while most of its security systems remained disintegrated and lacked sophistication. Octopus helped the firm by integrating their 50 sub-systems across cybersecurity, physical security, building management, and fraud detection. The integration and automation of all the systems have enabled the bank to use a single system to oversee/monitor any untoward events, while Octopus takes care of managing the bank’s unified communications, event management, managing mobile application for certain events, and delivering BI to conduct prediction and analysis. The firm’s prediction engine helps the bank to detect any unusual or untoward activities leading to a potential threat. This is achieved by correlating information security logs with physical logs.

The firm has fostered a great innovation culture within. The firm invests heavily in R&D and each of its products is tested and validated before being released to the market. Octopus prioritizes a complete POC with customers. “We were one of the first companies to provide a cloud-hosted command and control center to government organizations after it was safe proofed and evaluated for information security robustness and resiliency by the governmental internal information security agencies”, says an excited Tal Bar-Or, Founder, Octopus System. The firm looks forward with great excitement and is all set to capitalize on futuristic technologies including AI, Machine Learning, and predictive analytics in terms of implementing self-learning and detection of abnormalities and suspicious activities. Converged physical and cyber security, Smart city, IoT are the other areas Octopus is all set to strengthen its position on.

Octopus System has also received an accolade for its Global Command and Control for Critical Infrastructure with a New Product Innovation Award by Frost & Sullivan and was also just awarded the prestigious Red Herring top 100 North American award for 2018. Octopus is being consistently recognized by many tech platforms in the recent times as one of the top solution providers in the security domain.