EY has announced a number of new initiatives with Microsoft designed to help keep organizations safe as they move to the cloud, adopt the Internet of Things (IoT) and protect and secure their organizations from cybercrime.
Enhancing the alliance EY formed with Microsoft in 2015, the new capabilities are the first in a series of planned, jointly developed offerings to help organizations sense, resist, react and recover from cyberattacks. These capabilities include security services for the digital enterprise, digital identity, data protection, improved incident response and recovery capabilities and increased security in a cloud environment.
Unveiled at the RSA Conference 2017, the world’s largest gathering of cybersecurity professionals, the new services can tackle some of the toughest challenges that CIOs and CISOs at Fortune 500 and middle-market companies face. The challenges include building cyber readiness into all aspects of increasingly digital enterprises, improving detection and response and helping CISOs support the “innovate or die” environment that so many companies face.
”Organizations must protect their vital information during a time of digital transformation, without slowing down innovation and business development,” says Chad Holmes, EY Americas Cybersecurity Principal.
“Cyber attackers have evolved their tactics, techniques and procedures. We are focused on continued development of sophisticated tools that combine timely, business-related threat intelligence with deep technical experience and cutting-edge analytics so organizations can anticipate and recover from inevitable cyberattacks.”
Paul van Kessel, EY Global Cybersecurity Leader, says: “Findings from the annual EY Global Information Security Survey show that organizations are making progress in the way they sense and resist today’s cyber attacks and threats. But the results also indicate the need for considerable improvement if organizations want to stay operational while the world becomes more connected and attacks become more devastating. The new services Microsoft and EY developed can help our clients address their cybersecurity challenges as they continue transforming their businesses and increasing their footprint in the digital ecosystem.”
The new services include Secure Digital Enterprise to help organizations protect their new applications with secure development testing, adopt emerging digital technologies like IoT, track their digital identities and data, and provide true cloud security to help organizations build the required trust needed to support cloud adoption.
The Active Detection and Response offering combines Microsoft’s Enterprise Threat Detection (MDR), Incident Response and Persistent Adversary Detection Service with a wide range of EY strategic recovery services, like live war games, Cyber Compromise Diagnostics, forensics recovery and incident response which can help clients better detect, react and recover from any cyberattack or breach.
Under the EY Cybersecurity-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering, EY and Microsoft can now jointly provide a scalable, secure cloud monitoring and protection service through an integrated cloud- based environment using Microsoft Azure's advanced security technologies.
Cyber-as-a-service in the cloud
Along with the new offerings, EY cybersecurity managed services offerings are now broadly available through the Azure cloud platform.
The Azure cloud platform can enhance EY’s abilities to provide threat detection and response, threat exposure management, data protection, analytics and digital identity management services to its clients.
“Leveraging the EY Cyber-as-a-Service offerings to assist our clients with a trusted cloud managed and monitoring service allows our clients to adopt the Microsoft Azure cloud platform at a more rapid rate,” says Jonathan Trull, Global Chief Cybersecurity Advisor, Microsoft. “This unique cybersecurity relationship brings together the global power between the two organizations to bring innovative solutions to market to address the growing cybersecurity landscape.”
The joint cyber offerings from EY and Microsoft are an extension of other cybersecurity relationships that EY has built, including that with Los Alamos National Laboratory, announced in August 2015.