Tech News
WATCHFUL SKIES, SAFER NIGHTS: AI-DRIVEN VMS TRANSFORMING GULF MEGA-EVENTS
As the Gulf’s summer calendar fills with concerts, sporting events, and festivals, the region faces new and more complex security challenges. Managing crowd safety at large-scale public gatherings no longer depends on passive surveillance or security teams monitoring screens reactively. Instead, event organizers, law enforcement agencies, and technology providers are embracing AI-powered, integrated video management software (VMS) that helps security teams spot and address potential risks early, instead of only reacting after something goes wrong.
This evolution in surveillance comes at an important time for the region. From Dubai’s Disney on Ice, Lil Baby’s Wham World Tour, and the UNTOLD Dubai Festival at Coca-Cola Arena to Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Season concerts, international sporting tournaments, and mega entertainment festivals, large-scale spectacles have emerged as cornerstones of the Gulf’s rapidly expanding tourism and leisure economy. In 2024 alone, Dubai welcomed 18.72 million overnight visitors, up 9% from the previous year, while Riyadh and Jeddah continue to post record event attendance.
But as visitor numbers climb, so too does the complexity of keeping these spaces secure.
For years, video surveillance largely served as a passive, forensic tool by capturing footage for later review. Today, advanced VMS platforms are changing that model. AI-powered analytics embedded directly into VMS systems can automatically monitor crowd density, spot unusual movement or congestion, and raise alerts when early signs of trouble appear. This proactive approach transforms how security teams operate, allowing real-time interventions that help reduce risks while improving crowd flow and overall visitor experience.
Multiple Technologies brought together
At major venues across the Gulf, this shift is well underway.
Consider a sold-out concert at Dubai’s Coca-Cola Arena. Thousands of attendees filter through multiple entrances, while drone surveillance monitors crowd flow around parking areas and public transport hubs. Inside, thermal cameras quietly scan for signs of overheating electrical equipment or early-stage fires. All these data streams feed into a mobile command center, often set up in temporary trailers near the venue, where security teams and public safety agencies collaborate in real-time.
The advantage is not just faster incident response, but smarter prevention. AI-powered analytics embedded in Milestone’s platform can automatically count attendees in critical areas, flag unusual movement patterns, or detect crowd density risks long before they escalate into safety issues.
This type of command structure has become increasingly important as summer temperatures and high humidity, and seasonal surges, add an additional layer of risk for both attendees and emergency response teams.
A Region That Moves Fast and Safely
The wider regional momentum behind these events is just as significant.
The Gulf’s appetite for mega-events shows no sign of slowing. Dubai International Airport processed 92.3 million passengers in 2024, its highest annual traffic ever recorded, while major Saudi airports continue to scale operations under Vision 2030. These same smart infrastructure principles are now being extended to public events.
Open-platform VMS technology fits naturally into these ambitions, offering a flexible backbone that can scale from one event to another, integrate with emerging analytics tools, and support the kind of cross-agency cooperation that large public gatherings increasingly require.
The New Normal for Event Safety
Event organizers, venue operators, and government agencies across the Gulf are now approaching security not as a series of separate systems, but as a fully connected environment. At the heart of this lies open VMS platforms. These provide stakeholders with the ability to overlay venue maps, integrate drone surveillance, plug in temporary thermal sensors, and coordinate multiple responders, all through a shared video management interface, which reflects how the region is redefining public safety as part of its global event leadership.
Ultimately, securing the Gulf’s signature events that boost its tourism will increasingly rely on proactive, AI-enhanced surveillance models. Today, video management is about using real-time intelligence to help protect visitors, keep events running smoothly, and give the Gulf’s major showcases the safe, seamless experiences global audiences expect.
Tech News
NETSCOUT EXTENDS ADAPTIVE DDOS DEFENSE PROTECTION TO ADDRESS THE RISING BUSINESS COST OF WEAPONIZED BROADBAND AND IOT DEVICES
NETSCOUT® (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of observability, AIOps, cybersecurity, and DDoS attack protection solutions, today announced an extension of its Adaptive DDoS Protection (ADP) solution enabling service providers to automatically detect and mitigate outbound DDoS attack traffic. By extending protection from the attack target towards its source, NETSCOUT helps operators prevent compromised subscriber devices from disrupting their own networks, consuming costly capacity and attacking customers and organizations across the internet.
Consumer broadband routers, cameras and other IoT devices are increasingly being weaponized by Turbo-Mirai class botnets capable of generating multi-terabit attacks. These outbound attacks have already caused costly service outages, reputational damage and customer loss, and damage to peering relationships risking a large increase in transit costs at service providers around the world. By detecting and mitigating malicious traffic generated by compromised device populations before it leaves their networks, service providers can reduce abuse complaints and infrastructure costs while protecting their own networks and services and helping lower subscriber churn and regulatory risk.
“The combination of higher-speed broadband connectivity and vulnerable IoT devices has been weaponized by a new class of massive DDoS botnets,” said Patrick Donegan, founder and principal analyst, HardenStance. “Source-side mitigation, or attack suppression as it’s sometimes known, is a critical part of the equation. NETSCOUT’s approach, backed by its ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF) and ASERT analysts, gives service providers the tools they need to detect and stop attacks before they have an impact, protecting their customers and the broader internet from the large-scale DDoS attacks we have seen.”
Using AI-powered threat intelligence and automated detection and mitigation, NETSCOUT’s ADP solution, an addition to its Arbor Sightline and Arbor Threat Mitigation System:
- Automatically detects and mitigates ever evolving attacks through dynamic detection, intelligent redirection and adaptive mitigation.
- Extends these capabilities to outbound traffic, combining enhanced, customized detection with comprehensive threat intelligence tailored for each ISP.
- Uses NETSCOUT’s proprietary AI/ML-powered DDoS detection to analyze massive volumes of outbound internet traffic to uncover attacks designed to hide within legitimate flows.
- Draws on unique global real-time intelligence of DDoS activity covering approximately half of all internet traffic to rapidly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks and pinpoint the responsible, compromised devices.
“We are extending DDoS defense from the target to the source,” stated Darren Anstee, CTO, Security, NETSCOUT. “By using our internet-scale visibility to derive localized threat intelligence for our customers, NETSCOUT can identify and precisely suppress attacks at their origin, before they cause problems locally or at their target. This capability gives our customers a new level of comprehensive defense across their peering, transit, cloud and customer edges.”
This expansion of capabilities demonstrates how NETSCOUT is applying its global threat visibility and proven ADP solution to meet emerging service provider challenges. By extending an established inbound DDoS workflow to outbound and cross-bound threats, NETSCOUT enables operators to improve network-resilience, cost-controls and revenue protection through its proven Arbor Sightline and Arbor TMS solutions.
Tech News
Illumio Named Leader and Customer Favorite in Forrester Wave for Microsegmentation
Illumio Inc., the breach containment company, today announced it has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026 report. Illumio received the highest scores among all evaluated vendors in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories and was named a “Customer Favorite” for its outstanding customer feedback among evaluated vendors. According to the report, “Repeat customers indicate their satisfaction with the consistently high quality of technical support, regardless of the personnel assigned to their account.”
The report evaluated 10 microsegmentation providers against a comprehensive set of criteria covering product capabilities, strategy, innovation, and customer experience. Illumio received the highest scores possible in 10 evaluation criteria, including areas related to visualization, host-based enforcement, product security, vision, and innovation. According to the report, “Illumio excels at essential microsegmentation functions.”
“Illumio was founded on a simple belief: breaches are inevitable, but cyber disasters are not. We have been singularly focused on one objective — reducing lateral movement and attack surface, and increasing resilience in every organization,” said Andrew Rubin, CEO and Founder of Illumio. “Being named both a Leader and a Customer Favorite reflects to us the strength of our technology, vision, and even more importantly our ability to deliver real outcomes and risk reduction, which is the foundation of the trust our customers place in us every day. In the model threat world we are all now entering, defense must be coupled with resilience. Recovery is the new defense — and the new cyber.”
According to the Forrester Research report, “Organizations with large, heterogeneous environments focused on improving cyber resilience should consider Illumio.” The report also recognized Illumio for:
- “Illumio has articulated a vision for microsegmentation as a core element of security operations.”
- “Illumio is bridging the gap between its traditional users and other parts of the security organization by delivering agents mapped to personas from other teams.”
- “Its UI provides easy access to information that supports both access control and incident response use cases.”
The recognition follows continued innovation across the Illumio Platform, including Network Posture, which helps organizations understand security posture based on real-world traffic and prioritize risk reduction efforts. These capabilities support the growing need for visibility, cyber resilience, and regulatory readiness across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Designed for operational simplicity, the Illumio Platform combines Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation to help organizations identify, assess, and contain cyber risk across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Security teams can uncover high-risk exposures, visualize potential attack paths, and implement segmentation policies from a single platform to contain threats and improve cyber resilience.
The platform is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations, including BNP Paribas, eBay, and Microsoft, the latter of which has deployed Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation across its entire corporate IT environment. Igor Tsyganskiy, Global CISO of Microsoft, said: “When we needed to bring these capabilities into Microsoft, Illumio was the only segmentation solution that would work at the scale of Microsoft and deliver in our environment.”
Tech News
Rentify Introduces the First AI Workforce for Property Managers, Expanding Earn AI with Renewal Command Center
Earn AI grows into a team of specialised AI agents that help property managers scale operations, automate renewals and embed financial services while keeping people in control of every decision.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Rentify, a cutting-edge fintech & proptech startup, announced the launch of Renewal Command Center, the third specialised AI agent within Earn AI, its AI-native operating system for rental operations.
Today, Earn AI supports property portfolios representing more than AED 22 billion (USD 6 billion) in real estate assets and over AED 1.3 billion in annual rental value, demonstrating how some of the region’s largest property portfolios are already adopting AI-native rental operations.
Unlike traditional software that only records information, Earn AI detects what needs attention, prepares the required work and coordinates execution. Property managers can upload spreadsheets, lease agreements and fragmented portfolio information and see it transformed into a live, structured portfolio view in under 60 seconds.
Each specialised Earn AI agent has a clearly defined responsibility while operating within approval workflows that ensure property managers remain in complete control of every important decision.
| Agent | Core Responsibility |
| Intelligence Agent | Transforms spreadsheets, lease agreements and fragmented property data into a structured intelligence layer across an entire portfolio. |
| Collections Agent | Automated rent collection, payment coordination & portfolio-wide management |
| Renewal Command Center (NEW) | End-to-end renewal workflow that includes lease generation, prepares tenancy agreements accommodating tenant intel, insurance, Open Banking & payments across all Emirates |
Nearly 80% residential tenants renew their tenancy agreements each year, making renewals one of the largest recurring operational responsibilities for property managers. Across the real estate industry in the UAE, experienced property managers are expected to oversee larger portfolios while managing renewals, collections, tenant onboarding, documentation, compliance and financial coordination across multiple disconnected systems. As portfolios grow, operational work grows faster than teams.
Through Rentify’s product Rent Shield in partnership with YallaCompare, landlords and tenants can seamlessly access rental insurance during the renewal process. Integration with Spare, a leading open finance provider, enables Open Finance-powered affordability assessments and Pay-by-Bank payment orchestration that supports Rentify’s existing digital payment infrastructure. The platform will also make rent renewal seamless with embedded financial services.
Rajneel Kumar, Co-founder, Rentify, said, “We built Earn AI around a simple idea that technology should handle the operational heavy lifting so property managers can focus on outcomes for landlords and tenants. For decades, the only way to scale was to hire more people, but AI changes that. Renewal Command Center takes that idea into one of the most repetitive workflows in property management, connecting renewals, tenant intelligence, Open Banking, embedded insurance and payments in a single flow, with every critical decision still made by a person.”
Rashed Hareb, Co-founder & CEO, Rentify, said, “Property managers don’t need more dashboards. They need greater operational capacity. Over the next decade, every major operational function within the property management business will gain a specialised AI counterpart. Our role is to build an operating system that enables those teams to work together seamlessly.”
Rentify believes the future of property management is not about replacing people with artificial intelligence. It is about giving every property manager a specialised AI workforce that quietly handles repetitive operational work, allowing people to focus on relationships, judgement and portfolio growth.
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