Netscout is ramping up its AI capabilities to help telecom providers fight increasingly complex cyber threats. Speaking at MWC Barcelona 2025, the company revealed how its AI-driven cybersecurity solutions are designed to ease operational pressure while enhancing threat response for service providers.
Darren Anstee, Netscout’s CTO for Security, shared how the company is embedding AI and automation deeper into its product line. “We’re expanding AI and automation across our security products — adding new threat intelligence features and functionality to cut down on operational overhead while speeding up our customers’ response to threats,” Anstee explained.
Netscout operates across three divisions: enterprise service assurance, service provider service assurance, and security. Now, the company is sharpening its focus on solving urgent customer problems within the security space.
“My role is to shape strategy in our security division alongside our CEO,” Anstee said. “We’ve directed our AI investments toward solving real-world problems we’re seeing from our customers.”
A key part of Netscout’s strength comes from its vast data collection network. Over 500 service providers send live intelligence to Netscout every hour, offering a detailed view of internet traffic and threat activity worldwide.
“This gives us incredibly granular insight into where threats are coming from and where they’re headed,” Anstee noted. “We turn that raw data into actionable intelligence and deliver it back to customers every three hours, so they’re always updated on where attacks are coming from.”
Beyond intelligence gathering, Netscout is pushing AI deeper into its product stack to reduce the workload on cybersecurity teams. By analyzing attack patterns, the platform can automate defensive adjustments in real time — helping operators avoid manual configurations during an attack.
“Customers want more automated capabilities because speed is everything in security,” Anstee stressed. “Whether it’s a service issue or a cyberattack, faster responses are critical to protect availability.”
On the service assurance side, Netscout has also rolled out Omnis Analytics, an AI-powered system that refines datasets and surfaces the root cause of issues immediately — sparing operators the time-consuming task of troubleshooting.
“Instead of working through multiple workflows, Omnis presents the problem upfront and shows all the supporting root cause analysis,” Anstee explained.
Telecom providers continue to battle increasingly sophisticated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks evolve rapidly, often changing vectors mid-strike — forcing defenders to constantly reconfigure their mitigation strategies.
BT Group, for example, processes around 2,000 potential attack signals per second, adding up to 200 million daily threats. “The complexity is growing fast,” Anstee shared. “Our customers face attacks that shift and evolve — not just once, but continuously, even within the same attack.”
This constant evolution places a heavy burden on telco security teams, especially when nation-state adversaries launch coordinated campaigns across multiple targets. “For service providers, it means managing defenses for several customers at once — which amplifies the operational workload,” Anstee added.
With these growing threats, Netscout’s AI cybersecurity solutions are designed to empower operators — helping them spend less time analyzing and reconfiguring defenses, and more time staying ahead of attackers.
“Our AI focus is all about reducing analysis time and repetitive configuration changes,” Anstee said. “We’re giving operators the intelligence they need faster, so they can respond to threats in real time — not hours later.”
As cyberattacks grow more complex, Netscout’s AI-powered approach could prove vital in helping telecom providers protect their networks and customers from increasingly sophisticated threats.
