The world’s largest brewer, the Belgian multinational Anheuser-Busch InBev, will be opening a cybersecurity hub based in Israel with the purpose of preventing malicious attacks from damaging the data within the company. The city Tel Aviv on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, was picked to be the location of the company research hub to gather security intelligence analysis for developing various network and data protection methodologies.

According to a CyberDB article, Israel is known to be a world leader in cyber security, along with the United States, Russia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, France, China, and others. Israel is capable and well-prepared to deal with cyber security attacks. At the TAU Cyber-Tech conference in 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “A few years ago I decided to establish Israel as one of the five leading cyber powers in the world and I think by all accounts, we’re there.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu also stated at the 2017 Cyber-Tech conference that “Today Israel receives roughly one-fifth of the world’s global private investment in cybersecurity. One-fifth, it’s about 20 percent, and given that we are one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population. it means we’re punching about 200 times above our weight… there’s something here that defies numerical size and as I told you I think it actually works to our benefit that we have this concentration of talent here.”

There are a couple of reasons why corporations may select the nation for their cybersecurity sector. The companies that invest in cyber security in Israel include IBM security, Cybonet, Waterfall, Cyberark, and Synopsys. The investment encourages researchers and analysts to be involved in the cybersecurity field, equipping the nation with human resources and infrastructure needed to prevent attacks that could affect the national assets. Another reason is that Israel is located in a region with sensitive geopolitics; the country’s risk is having outsiders exploit its national data for unlawful purposes. Journalist and Defence Correspondent Alon Ben-David told VICE regarding Israel that, “It’s a very small community that is practically an island. You are completely surrounded with nations that you cannot cross through. Israel developed creativity to compensate for its lack of resources. And it is a country that needs to conduct constant surveillance on their neighbours. As a country which is under constant annihilation threat by other nations, Israel understood many years ago that going into wars and launching massive military operations, it bears almost unbearable prices.”

Anheuser-Busch InBev already has an Israeli research and development centre, employing around 100 people based on its 2018 acquisition of Tel Aviv-based beverage analytics startup WeissBeerger Ltd. Founded by Omer Agiv and Ori Fingerer, the company develops tools for monitoring bar operations and consumer behaviour. WeissBeerger intends to recruit 30 new employees in the upcoming year, Agiv told Calcalist in a recent interview.

In brief, the company decided to pick Israel to be the hub for cybersecurity research indicates that it desire solid prevention methodologies for its stakeholder data to remain private and secured.