Beyond Alerts: Building Smarter, Context-Aware Threat Detection

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Jeff Reed, chief product officer at Vectra AI, talks about the company’s latest advances in detection and response—and how AI is transforming the way enterprises defend against modern cyber threats.
Reed, who joined Vectra after years leading cloud security and product teams at Google, explains that traditional approaches to threat detection are no longer sufficient. Attackers are moving faster, blending into normal network activity, and exploiting the complexity of hybrid environments. The goal, he says, isn’t to add more alerts or data—it’s to surface the right signals with context and confidence.

Vectra’s approach uses AI to analyze identity, cloud, and network behaviors in real time, detecting subtle patterns that legacy systems overlook. Rather than relying solely on signature-based methods or static rules, AI-driven models continuously learn from enterprise traffic to identify deviations that signal compromise—long before an incident becomes visible.
Reed emphasizes that visibility across hybrid environments remains one of the biggest challenges. As workloads and identities span cloud, data center, and SaaS, defenders need detection that is both scalable and adaptive. The key is automation that accelerates investigation and response without overwhelming analysts.
He also touches on a broader theme: the cultural shift from reactive security to proactive defense. As attackers increasingly weaponize automation and AI, defenders must match that speed with smarter tools and operational agility.
For security teams, the future of threat detection isn’t about collecting more data—it’s about connecting it intelligently. AI will be the lens through which modern SOCs see, understand, and stop attacks in real time.

About Author

AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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