Bendigo Bank is overhauling its cyber security operations, consolidating its tools onto a single technology stack and working to stand up what it believes is Australia’s first agentic security operations centre, the bank’s chief security officer said this week.
Speaking at the Google Cloud Summit in Sydney, Gajan Ananthapavan said shifts in the cyber threat landscape mean the bank now needs incident response capabilities that operate at what he called “machine speed.” He predicted security operations teams across the industry will look fundamentally different within a few years, with AI agents taking over much of the detection and response work currently handled by junior analysts.
“A traditional security operations team won’t exist in its current format,” Ananthapavan said, according to comments reported by iTnews and Cyber Daily. He said he expects agentic AI to increasingly underpin security operations, freeing internal teams to focus on more advanced, higher-value work rather than routine monitoring and triage.
The rebuild is being carried out on a Google Cloud technology stack, in partnership with Google and professional services firm PwC. Ananthapavan said the bank deployed Google Threat Intelligence, Google Security Operations and Google’s Security Command Center within a four-month period, replacing an unspecified set of legacy tools that have since been switched off. He said savings from decommissioning those older systems have been redirected toward building out the bank’s agentic security capabilities.
Ananthapavan described the shift as a natural extension of security orchestration, automation and response systems, or SOAR, technology many security teams already use to automate routine tasks. He said the bank’s agentic capabilities are still in an early stage, but pointed to potential use cases such as using real-time agent-driven insights to automatically strengthen defences around customer-facing systems, including web application firewalls.
The move follows a broader partnership between Bendigo Bank and Google Cloud announced late last year, under which the bank began testing Google’s AI tools across functions including lending, refinancing and data analysis, and gave its developers access to Google’s Gemini Code Assist coding tool.
Bendigo Bank has faced scrutiny over how its technology transformation affects staff. The Finance Sector Union has previously raised concerns about the impact of the bank’s AI and automation partnerships on jobs, calling on chief executive Richard Fennell to reconsider elements of the changes.
Ananthapavan did not disclose which vendor supplied the bank’s previous security tooling, and the bank has not provided a timeline for when its agentic security operations centre will be fully operational.
