KUALA LUMPUR: IBM Malaysia Sdn Bhd has finalised a collaboration with Tech Mahindra to expand cybersecurity offerings for local enterprises, including managing security compliance and strengthening business information systems.
IBM Malaysia managing director and technology leader Catherine Lian said the partnership stems from its new go-to-market strategy, which focuses on developing its partner ecosystem while deploying its direct sales resources to engage the largest accounts looking for integrated solutions from IBM.
"Our business partners play a pivotal role in innovating further on IBM platforms to develop specialised, customised solutions in clients' best interest," said Catherine in a statement.
IBM Malaysia, in the statement, said that for many companies, securing highly sensitive data remains a challenge.
Cybersecurity is currently the top barrier to adoption and the top criteria for the selection of cloud providers.
As a part of this partnership, Tech Mahindra will work with IBM to co-develop innovative products and services and enhance existing solutions.
Tech Mahindra has successfully delivered security services to customers worldwide for over two decades.
These solutions comprise QRadar XDR (threat detection and response), Cloud Pak for Security, and Guardium.
QRadar responds proactively to cyber threats through its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
The open security platform called 'Cloud Pak for Security' and Guardium is renowned for its 'zero-trust' approach to protecting sensitive, regulated data across environments and platforms.
Using AI and automation is the single most impactful factor in reducing the time to detect and respond to cyberattacks and the ensuing cost.
In the area of cybersecurity, Catherine said that with digital transformation becoming a 'matter of survival', the trend is for local enterprises to fully optimise their IT infrastructure, which entails deploying, running, and managing data and applications across a 'sprawling estate' of on-premises, private, and public cloud environments.
"Establishing appropriate controls and policies is a question of organisational culture as deploying the right toolset. This means making information security a priority across all areas of the enterprise," she said.
Meanwhile, Tech Mahindra chief digital services officer Kunal Purohit said guarding the cyber frontier has become imperative for enterprises.
"There is a pressing need for holistic and advanced cyber-defence solutions that respond proactively to cyber-threats and bring data aggregation, analytics, visibility, orchestration, AI, and ML (machine learning) capabilities bundled together," said.
"As one of the world's leading managed security services providers, Tech Mahindra is renowned for our comprehensive portfolio of services backed by a skilled workforce, new-age technologies, and strategic implementation of business processes," Kunal said.
The company has a proven track record of successful service delivery on the security front in advising, implementing, and maintaining security solutions and ensuring the maximum return on customers' security investments.
"With our innovative and industry-leading offerings, we aim to enable enterprises to realise uncompromised zero-trust security while empowering them to experience assured digital trust through secure-by-design industry use cases," he said.
On the IBM ecosystem, Catherine said it is all about the different partners that the company works with to create the overall experience and the overall offering.
"At its core, IBM's new go-to-market strategy is all about helping our partners be even more successful and deliver even more value to clients," she said.
On the cybersecurity landscape, a study by research firm IDC revealed that investment in security-related products and services will grow at a robust compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.1 per cent over the forecast period (2020-2025) and reach US$39 billion (RM168 billion) by 2025.
"Given such a scenario, the IBM-Tech Mahindra partnership is timely for enterprises seeking advanced and optimised security solutions," said Catherine.
"The future of security is open, using technologies that can connect the security insights buried across disparate tools and advanced AI to identify and automatically respond to threats more quickly across their entire infrastructure, from endpoint to overall cloud protection," said Catherine.