Mobily, a leading telecom services operator in Saudi, has teamed up with technology giant IBM to offer top-class managed security services (MSS) to the business sector in Kingdom for mitigating the impact of security breaches to avoid data loss, financial loss and business disruption.

The rapid evolvement in security technologies requires unique skilled expertise and up-to-date infrastructure, which makes these trends costly for businesses to acquire, said a statement from Mobily.

The new MSS portfolio is a cloud-based solution that contains five different managed security services which are: IBM Managed Firewall Service, IBM Managed Unified Threat Management (UTM), IBM Managed Intrusion Detection and Prevention Service (IDPS/IPS), IBM Security Log and Event Management (SELM), IBM Vulnerability Management Service (VMS).

By streamlining the process of transition to outsourcing the security management; Mobily-IBM Alliance provide cost-effective services, which help enterprises to improve their security posture, as well as allow them to focus on their core businesses. Additionally, the alliance has planned to launch other managed security services in the coming years.

In information security landscape, benchmarks of confidentiality, integrity and availability are common for measuring the security differentiation.

Mobily has recognized the Saudi market challenges; therefore a strategic vision has been achieved accordingly by fulfilling the market requirements with comprehensive services in security management, which can improve the setup time to secure infrastructure, eliminate the needs of complex procedures, and reduce the operational costs of security management activities, it stated.

Dr Marwan Al Ahmadi, Mobily’s CBO said the recent increased rate of security threats had raised the awareness for security protection and management.

"We at Mobily always strive to understand the needs of our customers in business sector; therefore our managed security services will significantly contribute to protect enterprises’ IT infrastructures in the kingdom," he noted.

Mobily and IBM had last year signed a five-year alliance partnership agreement in August, which allows Mobily exclusively to provide MSS services to the Saudi Arabian market, and perform the daily operations through the Mobily-IBM Security Operations Center (SOC) that is located in Mobily’s Tier IV certified data center in Riyadh.-TradeArabia News Service