The cyber-attack landscape is expanding with new and growing threats. From the proliferation of Internet of Things-connected devices to the increasing number of “hacktivists” and ransomware attacks on organizations and individuals, risks are present everywhere. Enterprises are seeing cyber-attacks rising and recognize that they can lead to large financial losses, reputational damage and even complete business disruption.
Organizations must have a proactive defense strategy that not only prevents an intrusion, but can also quickly detect and effectively respond to it. However, many organizations, regardless of size, are not capable of running a complete security operations center with the specific expertise needed during a 24x7x365 work schedule.
Leading global professional services firms like Deloitte are stepping in to address this growing gap with innovative new risk and cyber security services. Deloitte has been offering its managed security monitoring solutions and Risk Intelligence Centers to its customers worldwide for over a decade. Deloitte is now providing its customers with a new cloud-based managed security monitoring solution that leverages our Equinix colocation and interconnection data centers and the Equinix Cloud Exchange .
One in over twenty of Deloitte’s global Risk Intelligence Centers is based in The Netherlands and is the first such Security-as-a-Service solution supported by the Cloud Exchange. This premier deployment of its cloud-based risk and cyber security services will significantly increase opportunities for Deloitte to scale its technology-enabled solutions, which currently make up a rapidly growing part of its overall business.
Recently, I talked with Deloitte Risk Advisory and Technology Enabled Solutions director Kees Plas and senior manager Coen Steenbeek about the company’s new cloud-based security and event monitoring services and how they help enterprises monitor, mitigate and recover from attacks.
Kees and Coen explained that Deloitte enables enterprises to be more secure, vigilant and resilient, first by performing security testing to determine how to avoid attacks via preventative controls and security management services. Then, the Deloitte professionals team up with organizations to continuously monitor the network in real-time and use predictive analytics against base lines, trends and history to make sure the Deloitte team can determine what is going wrong and respond appropriately.
According to Kees, “Because we are a global organization, we can use the information we gather from our more than twenty Risk Intelligence Centers around the world, allowing us to help our customers make the most informed decisions as quickly as possible.”
Kees and Coen said Equinix is the only vendor that can provide Deloitte with direct and secure, high-performance interconnection to multiple regional and global cloud service providers via the Cloud Exchange and proximate access to vendor neutral ecosystems of Software-as-a-Service and network service providers. Equinix’s global presence also enables Deloitte to meet its clients’ data security and protection regulatory and compliance requirements.
“Equinix is tremendously responsive and proactive. Delivering the services through the Cloud Exchange works specifically well with our larger clients that use multiple cloud solutions, which we can now monitor much more efficiently,” Coen said.
Deloitte’s cloud-based cyber security services are currently available to all of its global customers from The Netherlands facility, but its footprint will be expanding into Equinix data centers worldwide for greater proximity to its customers in order to further optimize the performance and cost benefits.