WorkNest Secure has expanded its GuardNest platform with continuous vulnerability scanning, giving organisations ongoing visibility into security weaknesses rather than relying solely on periodic penetration tests.

The new capability is designed to help businesses monitor vulnerabilities across internet-facing systems, web applications, and internal environments, providing continuous oversight of their attack surface as threats and infrastructure evolve.

The launch comes as organisations face increasing pressure from customers, insurers, and regulators to demonstrate continuous vulnerability management and stronger cyber resilience.

Moving beyond annual penetration testing

While penetration testing remains a critical part of any cybersecurity strategy, WorkNest Secure says annual or point-in-time assessments no longer provide a complete picture of an organisation’s security posture.

The enhanced GuardNest platform combines automated vulnerability scanning with expert analysis and remediation support, allowing organisations to identify vulnerabilities as they emerge and prioritise the issues that present the greatest business risk.

Organisations can schedule scans, monitor vulnerabilities in real time, and manage remediation activities through a single dashboard.

The platform now supports external vulnerability scanning, internal vulnerability scanning, web application scanning, and agent-based internal scanning, allowing customers to tailor the service to their environment and compliance requirements.

Simplifying vulnerability management

Alongside continuous scanning, GuardNest introduces new remediation workflows designed to help security and IT teams manage vulnerabilities more effectively.

Organisations can assign remediation tasks, define service level targets based on vulnerability severity, and track progress through to resolution. Automated escalation and SLA tracking are intended to ensure vulnerabilities are actively managed rather than simply recorded in reports.

The platform also includes live dashboards, historical trend reporting, and automated reporting that can support compliance initiatives, cyber insurance renewals, customer due diligence, and certifications including ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus, and PCI DSS.

Helping organizations focus on what matters

Kirsty Fowler, Managing Director of WorkNest Secure, said organisations need greater visibility into their cyber risks as environments continue to change.

“Cyber threats do not operate to an annual schedule, yet many organisations are still relying on point-in-time assessments to understand their security posture,” Fowler said.

“New vulnerabilities emerge every day and infrastructure changes constantly, so businesses need visibility of their risks as they exist today, not six months ago.”

She added that the new functionality is intended to reduce the complexity of vulnerability management by combining automation with expert support.

“By combining automated scanning with expert support and practical remediation guidance, we help organisations cut through the noise, understand what matters most, and know exactly where action is needed,” Fowler said.

Responding to changing security needs

The launch reflects a broader shift in how organisations approach cybersecurity investment, with many moving away from one-off security projects in favour of continuous monitoring and ongoing risk management.

WorkNest Secure said the new functionality is available immediately either as a standalone vulnerability management service or as part of existing GuardNest packages.

The latest release builds on the redesign of the GuardNest platform in 2025, which introduced a more collaborative and user-friendly approach to vulnerability management, penetration testing, and remediation.

The post WorkNest Secure Launches Continuous Vulnerability Scanning with GuardNest appeared first on IT Security Guru.

Summary Bullets:

• Enterprises are deploying AI agents leveraging Google Cloud’s solutions and achieving positive business outcomes.
• Google Cloud offers the full AI stack, and its sovereign cloud and cyber solutions are especially crucial for enterprise customers.

AI agents are no longer an idea. They are now being deployed by enterprises to improve internal workplace productivity and external customer experience. At Google Cloud Summit Sydney (held on June 25, 2026), more examples of agentic AI in operations were presented, moving from deterministic AI chatbots to more autonomous systems. Bunnings, a home improvement, gardening, and hardware products retailer in Australia, upgraded its Buddy AI chatbot that helped customers with product search to an AI agent that takes customers’ descriptions of their projects and fills the shopping carts with the products that they need. Bunnings indicated an uplift of conversion rates and basket sizes when customers engage with Buddy. Similarly, Woolworths supermarket has an agentic AI powered Olive assistant that is able to build shopping baskets from recipe photos and assist with proactive meal planning. These two examples demonstrate how AI agents trained with proprietary knowledge (e.g., Bunnings’s DIY catalog and Woolworths’ recipe catalog) can deliver greater customer outcomes.

Enterprises deploying AI will appreciate the importance of data. To benefit from AI, it is necessary for enterprises to tap into corporate data to impart knowledge to AI agents. Google Cloud has the advantage in this area since enterprises have been adopting its products such as BigQuery to manage their data more effectively. Moreover, the company has other associated products such as Google Maps, Google Search, and Google Workspace that customers can leverage to enhance their AI capabilities. Transurban, an Australian road operations company and toll road operator, works with Google Cloud to transform its interaction with customers. While customer relationships are mainly transactional, Transurban now leverages Google Cloud’s solutions such as Gemini Enterprise, BigQuery, and Google Maps to power its Linkt app with the “Linkt AI” assistant, which proactively suggests optimal travel routes and toll options, dynamically adjusts schedules for prevailing weather, delivers timely account balance notifications, and offers discounted hotel and attraction bookings for upcoming road trips.

Data is the most valuable asset for enterprises particularly in the age of AI. Many companies across jurisdictions are increasingly concerned about security and sovereignty. Google Cloud offers a set of options for enterprises to meet their data and AI sovereignty requirements. It addresses not just the issue of data residency but also operational sovereignty and software sovereignty. Firstly, Google Cloud Data Boundary helps customers to meet data residency requirements through a set of controls, e.g., regions where data is stored, compliance programs, and external customer or partner managed encryption keys. This option allows enterprises to enjoy the benefits of hosting data in the public cloud for operational flexibility and high availability. Google Cloud is also offering support services with personnel meeting specific geographical locations as well as monitoring capabilities with real-time alerts when organization policy changes violate the defined compliance posture.

For customers that have a more stringent requirement on operational sovereignty, Google Cloud Dedicated addresses the need by enabling solutions to be operated by an independent local partner. The solution is hosted in a standalone, local instance of Google Cloud. The local partner maintains exclusive control over security-critical systems, identity management, authentication, etc. as well as controls over communication between Google and the Google Cloud Dedicated environment. For example, S3NS (a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud that is headquartered in Paris, France) offers PREMI3NS services built on Google Cloud Dedicated for customers in Europe, now generally available in France. S3NS has achieved SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification from the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI). Google Cloud Dedicated is also available in Germany (in preview).

For clients with the most stringent sovereignty requirements, Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped allows complete isolation, without connectivity to an external network. The solution gives customers the flexibility to use general purpose compute and GPUs, and leverage open-source software. Google Cloud has also made its Gemini available in this air-gapped option, giving customers generative AI capabilities including automation, content generation, discovery and summarization. The GDC air-gapped solution is now deployed by many government agencies including those in Australia and Singapore within the Asia-Pacific region.

Besides sovereignty, Google Cloud has been bolstering its capability to offer stronger cyber defense. This includes the acquisition of Mandiant to add threat intelligence and incident response capabilities as well as Wiz for multi-cloud security defense. At the Google Cloud Summit, the company together with Wiz demonstrated how agentic AI can help to improve protection at scale and speed. Wiz is offering three AI agents with distinct roles: the Red Agent helps to uncover vulnerabilities and validate exploitable risks across web applications and APIs; the Blue Agent is the threat investigator that gathers evidence across cloud telemetry, runtime signals, and identity context to assess the severity of a threat and allow threats to be resolved more proactively; and the Green Agent is the investigation and remediation engine, identifying the root cause of a risk and the safest and most effective resolution. Wiz is known to provide security for cloud-native applications across major cloud environments including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle. Following the completed acquisition on March 11, 2026, Wiz joins Google Cloud but operates independently to maintain its brand and key value proposition.

Google Cloud offers the full AI stack including applications and agents, AI models, data platforms, and infrastructure. It has also demonstrated strong momentum through broad customer references. However, the ability to drive AI adoption ultimately lies with its partner ecosystem and its willingness to support third-party products (including AI models) and help customers operate within a multi-cloud environment. Consulting partners such as Accenture and Mantel Group were featured at the Google Cloud event, and these partners play a crucial role in helping enterprises develop their business strategy around AI and implement solutions addressing data, security, governance, and other technology challenges.

The post Google Cloud Summit Sydney: Putting Agentic AI into Action appeared first on IT Connection.