BT gets closer to Google Cloud with new cyber security deal

As part of a new deal with Google, UK incumbent BT will become an official reseller of some of the tech giant’s cloud security products.

BT will become a ‘managed services delivery partner’ for Google Chronicle based Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) products, utilising BT’s Security Advisory Services team and its ‘track record of delivering cybersecurity services to organisations with complex estates and requirements.’

ASO as a security platform is supposed to provide an adaptive and automated approach to threat management, and thus decrease the time to detect and respond to cyber attacks. It is underpinned by various big guns in the Google arsenal such as Chronicle’s peta-byte scale detection, a data lake powered by Google Cloud’s data and analytics platform BigQuery, and analytics via Looker.

“Combining Google Chronicle’s capabilities with BT’s view of global networks and experience of providing managed security services is a really exciting prospect,” said Tris Morgan, Managing Director, Security at BT. “The ASO solution will help our customers to rapidly identify risks and automatically enhance their cyber defences—providing the speed that’s essential to combating cyber-attacks. It represents the first step in our partnership with Google Cloud on cybersecurity, with both companies committed to providing new innovations and solutions that help organisations stay ahead of an increasingly threatening cyber threat landscape,” said Tris Morgan, Managing Director, Security at BT.”

Magali Bohn, Global Director, Partnerships and Channels at Google Cloud Security added: “Our partnership brings the best of BT’s experience in deploying big data-based security platforms with Google Cloud’s innovative security capabilities to help our multinational customers transform their approaches to cyber risk management in the face of a rapidly changing threat landscape.”

BT and Google Cloud will additionally seek to incorporate solutions from Mandiant, a ‘threat intelligence solutions outfit acquired by Google in 2022, into the mix, and are also looking to trial Google’s Vertex AI and Duet AI capabilities.

The move represents growing ties between the two firms, as indeed is celebrated in the release pointing to a five-year deal signed last year that saw BT tap Google Cloud for a broad suite of products and services, including cloud infrastructure, machine learning (ML) and AI, data analytics, security and API management.

It will be interesting to see how increased integration between big tech’s cloud and AI platforms and European telecom operators will play out if anything comes of the push to make firms like Google help fund their network rollouts, an open letter contributing to this pressure having been signed by BT last week.

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