ManageEngine’s Praneet V explains why security tool sprawl remains a constant risk, how ZIA brings operational context into one place, and which manual work IT teams should hand to AI before the year is out.
Many breaches still begin with an endpoint nobody patched or an administrator account left active long after its owner moved on. Security budgets across the region have grown alongside digital transformation, and many organisations have responded to each new gap by buying another tool. The result is IT teams watching more dashboards while seeing less of what is happening across their estate.
ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho, sees that problem from an unusual position. Its software covers endpoint management, IT service management, operations monitoring and security information and event management, and it connects to firewalls at the perimeter.
That gives the company a view of how a business runs as well as how it is attacked. At GISEC Global 2026 in Dubai, AI Times spoke to Praneet V, Technical Evangelist at ManageEngine, about why tool sprawl has become a permanent risk, how the company is feeding that operational context to its ZIA AI, and which tasks IT teams should stop doing manually.
ManageEngine operates inside the IT estate as well as at the security perimeter. What does that vantage point reveal that most security vendors miss?
ManageEngine works across many parts of a business. We offer a SIEM solution and an ITSM solution, we monitor endpoint traffic through our unified endpoint management and security platform, and our monitoring tools give us visibility into our clients’ day-to-day operations. That breadth is our first advantage. The second is our work at the perimeter, where we integrate with firewalls, and on the SIEM side we offer Firewall Analyzer. Together, these give us a great deal of additional insight beyond the core of what our clients do as a business, and we use that context as the foundation for informing their security plans.
Many breaches still start with an unpatched endpoint or a dormant admin account. Which element of basic security hygiene remains the hardest sell for organisations, despite years of transformation?
A problem we see repeatedly is organisations buying siloed solutions. One tool patches their Windows machines, another handles their Mac devices, and a separate team or product manages the servers.
Organisations end up running a large number of point solutions when a single, unified platform could handle much of that work in one place.
At the same time, IT operations and cybersecurity are converging. We believe a solution should therefore meet two requirements. It should cover a wide range of needs from a single platform, and it should be built with cybersecurity in mind from the start.
IT teams in the UAE are buying more tools yet gaining less visibility, with a crowded market and constant pressure to adopt new products. At what point does the tooling itself become a risk?
Tooling is a risk at every stage. Although we work across several domains, we give clients the option of a single product that covers everything within a given domain. The second issue emerged with the arrival of AI, which has brought an AI for almost everything, with one vendor offering an AI for patch management and another offering an AI for something else entirely. Our approach is to bring all of that context into one place,
so that AI can work from it and connect everything in a unified way. That is why we developed ZIA, Zoho’s AI, and built an ecosystem around it that includes ZIA Agent and ZIA LLM. ZIA capabilities are embedded across our products, allowing it to view all of an organisation’s data through a single lens and help the business accordingly.
What is one task IT teams, in the region and around the world, should stop doing manually by the end of this year or early next year?
I would advise IT teams to automate any task they repeat on a regular basis, because AI is now capable of handling that work. Within ManageEngine, ZIA Agent can correlate everything happening across an environment and act on behalf of users. We see the industry moving towards a model in which repetitive work is handed to AI, while tasks that demand strategy or involve greater complexity remain with people. That is the direction we are seeing, and it is the approach we recommend to all our clients.
