| Time for a new way | |
| “Managed security services will enable the delivery of the required protection of local and remote and cloud based environments in an effective” |  Renaissance Contingency Services Ltd: Michael Conway, director |
| Investment in technology has been slow over the last number of years — very much as a result to the economic slowdown. Now after a long delay in significant investment and with a paradigm shift in technologies and solutions and a new way of delivering technologies which enable and support business, it is a perfect time to move to managed security services.Managed security services will enable the delivery of the required protection of local and remote and cloud based environments in an effective manner affording organisations the breadth and depth of skills required. Implementing new technologies and the proliferation of data means that the traditional means of working are no longer appropriate or valid.
In our experience partners are seeing a significant change in customers’ demands and needs to be secure and the environments are now more distributed and divers that before. The data is everywhere and controls and security needs to be 24 x 7 and monitoring to ensure that data maintains private, retails its integrity and confidentiality and is available to support the needs of the organisation.
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| Removing the burden | |
| “You must consider the range of threats you are dealing with internally and externally. Internally, workforces are much more diverse and mobile, this brings in data management and security challenges due to the influx of employees’ mobile devices” |  Ergo :George Dowling, cloud and managed services practice lead |
| It is not difficult to outline this business case to our customers and they are typically somewhat aware of the risk and potential impacts to their business if they treat this topic lightly. Actively monitoring all IT security threats to your business is a full-time endeavour, requiring access to the appropriate tools, knowledge, processes and resources.To set up this level of security management would involve teams working shifts around the clock, with on call and escalation mechanisms in place. Organisations would still require access to security subscriptions and third parties for support when security incidents occur. This factor alone is cost prohibitive to most operations.Additionally, you must consider the range of threats you are dealing with both internally and externally to your organisation. Internally, workforces are much more diverse and mobile, this brings in data management and security challenges due to the influx of employees’ mobile devices. A new array of tools are required including Mobile Device Management, multi factor authentication, encryption and data wipe and recovery. Externally you are exposed to threats 24 hours a day from international hackers who can originate from any region or walk of life.
Now consider the cloud. As robust as most cloud providers security and control mechanism are, organisations don’t want to simply dump their business critical data into the cloud without at least some level of monitoring or at best a level of encryption that will render their data useless to whomever compromises it. Considering all these factors, it’s easy to understand why our customers are removing their security management burden by outsourcing to Ergo.
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| Ever changing landscape | |
| “The willingness for customers to partner in this area is due in part to having the reporting and analysis tools which allows customers the transparency to see what is happening” |  Colt Technology Services : Andrew Finnigan, account director |
| We are seeing an upsurge in interest in our Managed Security suite for a number of reasons:
1) Ever changing landscape of threats and cost required to manage effectively – Colt has the expertise and scale to continue to deal effectively and bring the best technologies to the market…most companies don’t have this capability on their own. 2) Our large portfolio of customers/verticals across Europe allows us to see trends through a wider spectrum compared with than customers who may only see security relatively narrowly through the eyes of the industry they operate in. 3) Increased uptake in XaaS models underpinned by SLA and true service tailoring is bringing a traditionally ‘in house only’ mentality into the managed service arena because a positive service and business outcome is more assured. The willingness for customers to partner with Colt in this area is due in part to Colt having the reporting and analysis tools which allows customers the transparency to see what is happening but more so the SLA that comes from being able to control the network to the datacentre and everything in between. This allows them to refocus IT staff to more business related activity rather than maintenance and management.
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