NEC Australia & Exabeam expand security partnership

NEC Australia and Exabeam have expanded their strategic partnership in Australia, with a focus on security operations and insider risk in automated environments.

Under the agreement, NEC Australia will work with Exabeam to provide behaviour-based security analytics for organisations operating across hybrid and cloud-native systems. The arrangement is designed to help security teams detect threats earlier, reduce investigation effort, and gain broader visibility across users, entities, and software agents.

The expansion reflects growing demand for security tools that can track both human and non-human activity as businesses adopt more AI, automation, and digital workflows. At the same time, organisations are managing a broader mix of service accounts, autonomous systems, and cloud infrastructure, making it harder for security teams to spot abnormal behaviour through conventional rule-based monitoring alone.

NEC Australia already uses Exabeam technology in its own security operations environment and is now deepening the relationship as customers face what the two companies describe as the challenges of an "agentic enterprise", where automated systems and human users operate side by side at machine speed.

Behaviour focus

Exabeam's technology is based on behavioural analysis rather than fixed rules, focusing on patterns that fall outside normal activity. This approach can help uncover insider threats, compromised credentials, and more advanced attacks that traditional security tools may miss.

The platform combines User and Entity Behaviour Analytics, known as UEBA, with Agent Behaviour Analytics, or ABA. In practice, organisations can build baselines for how staff, systems, and automated agents typically behave, then flag unusual actions for further investigation.

For NEC Australia, this is expected to support managed security services for large, distributed organisations that need to monitor broad and complex digital estates. Stronger behavioural context can help customers identify anomalous activity and reduce risk across both people and machine-driven agents.

Hanré van Rensburg, Head of Service Strategy, NEC Australia, outlined the rationale for the expanded tie-up.

"Australian organisations are embracing AI, automation and increasingly complex digital operating environments, creating new opportunities but also new security challenges," said van Rensburg.

"As organisations move towards the agentic enterprise, security teams require greater visibility into both human and non-human activity across their environments.

"Our strengthened partnership with Exabeam enhances NEC Australia's managed security services capability, enabling us to help customers detect threats earlier, reduce investigation effort and improve security outcomes through advanced behavioural analytics and AI-assisted security operations."

Automation pressure

The partnership also points to a broader shift in cybersecurity operations as vendors and service providers incorporate more automation into threat detection, investigation, and response. Exabeam says its system uses AI-based security agents to handle parts of that workflow, including data enrichment, correlation of activity across environments, and the assembly of evidence-backed timelines for investigators.

That matters for security teams dealing with large volumes of alerts and limited staffing. By filtering routine activity and highlighting actions that deviate from established patterns, behavioural analytics systems aim to reduce alert fatigue and direct analysts to incidents that require attention.

Sean Abbott, Director of Channel and Alliances - APJ, Exabeam, said NEC Australia's role in complex customer environments made it a strong fit for the company's technology.

"NEC Australia has a strong track record of delivering trusted technology and security services across some of the most complex environments in the region," said Abbott.

"This partnership brings Behaviour Intelligence to the centre of security operations. By applying User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) and Agent Behaviour Analytics (ABA), NEC Australia can help customers surface high-risk activity earlier, cut through alert noise, and focus security teams on the threats that matter."

Exabeam says it serves more than 3,000 enterprises worldwide. Its pitch is increasingly tied to the need to monitor not only employees and contractors, but also digital workers and software agents taking on a larger role inside corporate systems.

In Australia, the expanded relationship gives NEC Australia another security offering for customers revising cyber operations around cloud services, automation, and AI-driven processes. The focus will be on helping organisations establish behavioural baselines and identify suspicious activity across mixed environments where human and machine actions intersect.