Case Study: ED&F Man Holdings achieves rapid AI-powered threat detection and cuts investigation time from hours to minutes with Vectra AI Inc.'s Cognito platform

Commodities trader finds sweet spot with AI-powered threat detection

ED&F Man Holdings, a $10 billion commodities trader operating in 60 countries that sources, stores and ships sugar, coffee and other agricultural products, faced a wake-up call after a security incident and an independent assessment that showed its cybersecurity needed a major upgrade. Under cybersecurity manager Carmelo Gallo, the company set out to transform its security operations, tools and people to better detect and respond to modern attacks.

ED&F deployed Vectra’s Cognito AI-driven network detection and response, added Cognito Recall for threat hunting, and integrated those insights with endpoint detection and response and its SIEM via automation and APIs. The integrated, automated SOC reduced noisy alerts from roughly 200 per week to about 4–5 per month (and priority alerts from hundreds to single digits), cut investigation times from hours to minutes, stopped MITM, cryptomining and long‑running command‑and‑control attacks, and let the security team scale while earning greater trust from the business.

ED&F Man Holdings

Carmelo Gallo

Cybersecurity Manager