![\"Bendigo](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/ImageResizer.ashx.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nBendigo Bank is making significant changes to its security operations, re-platforming to a single technology stack and building what it speculates is Australia\u2019s \u201cfirst agentic SOC\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n (L-R) Bendigo Bank’s CSO Gajan Ananthapavan and PwC’s Mike Cerny.
\n <\/p>\n
Chief security officer Gajan Ananthapavan told the Google Cloud Summit Sydney that changes in the threat landscape demanded the bank have incident response capabilities that move at \u201cmachine speed\u201d.<\/p>\n
He predicted a looming, fundamental shift in security operations over time that will reduce dependency and reliance on level 1 and 2 SOC analysts in incident response and defensive activity.<\/p>\n
\u201cA traditional security operations team won\u2019t exist in its current format,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Instead, security operations are set to be increasingly supported and underpinned by agentic AI capabilities, with internal security teams\u2019 focus shifting to more advanced, high-value work.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s going to take time as we start to deploy our agentic capabilities, build confidence in those models, and get to a point where we can rely on [their] decision-making,\u201d Ananthapavan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re at the very early stage of our journey, and for us we will still very much have humans in the loop as we build confidence … in our agentic models.<\/p>\n
“We will then look at the right time to pull humans out of the loop and enable our staff to focus on high-value [security] work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Underpinning Bendigo Bank\u2019s push to stand up an \u201cagentic SOC\u201d is a technology stack from Google Cloud that consolidates multiple existing systems and tools, and a partnership both with the hyperscaler and PwC.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithin a period of four months, we\u2019ve \u2026 deployed Google Threat Intelligence, Google SecOps, and Google\u2019s Security Command Center,\u201d Ananthapavan said.<\/p>\n
While not revealing what the bank previously used, Ananthapavan said that the existing systems had been switched off, and any savings had been ploughed into building agentic security capabilities.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Decommissioning systems has] certainly given us a greater flexibility and financial freedom to be able to do that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Ananthapavan characterised the agents as an evolution of the automation that had been possible using a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) system.<\/p>\n
Agentic capabilities are anticipated not only to improve decision-making around incident response, but also to drive proactive improvements in security posture and controls.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce we get to a point where we\u2019ve got those real-time insights and we\u2019re able to drive decision-making in terms of actions that the agents can drive in the context of our environment, we will have an opportunity to start to use those agents to strengthen our defences,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt could be something as simple as our web application firewalls that protect our customer-facing services, [where] we can use that information, insights and those agents to start to drive real-time uplift of our control environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, what we\u2019re starting with now – and we\u2019re still very early on – will empower our security operations team, but I see it empowering our security teams more broadly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ry Crozier attended Google Cloud Summit Sydney as a guest of Google Cloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bendigo Bank is making significant changes to its security operations, re-platforming to a single technology stack and building…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":772736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-772735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/772736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}