Deutsche Telekom offers security as a managed service

Deutsche Telekom has expanded its Telekom Security business unit to include threat intelligence and security analytics services for external customers.

Security is one of the telco industry’s biggest problems, with very few prioritizing security outside of PR-seeking sound-bites, but also because it’s a constant game of catch-up. For every leak patched, cyber criminals will find a vulnerability; being a security engineer is a stressful and thankless task.

Deutsche Telekom has built an in-house team of security engineers over recent years which analyses, processes and compresses data volumes in its own Security Operations Centres (SOCs), to protect its own infrastructure. Security analysts intelligently filter out any items of relevance, which is then passed onto experts who analyse any actual incidents and act to take any necessary countermeasures.

This is something which Deutsche Telekom has done for its own operations for quite some time now, so why not sell it onto business customers as a managed service?

Making money or being innovative isn’t necessarily about doing something mind-blowingly different, but spotting a gap in the market and exploiting it. And that’s essentially what Deutsche Telekom has done here; nothing new, just realizing there’s money to be made.

“The best security strategy is the one that consolidates strengths” said Dirk Backofen, Head of Telekom Security. “And our more than 1200 security experts in Telekom Security guarantee this, day in and day out. Our primary focus lies on continuous monitoring at all levels: network, operating system activities, content, user behaviour patterns and application transactions.

“With an individual mix of the best monitoring and analysis tools, combined with our massive threat intelligence database, we can offer our customers the flexible resources and complementary technologies they need for all possible applications – including manufacturing and industry.”

One of the most relevant USPs being put forward here is the idea of experience. Deutsche Telekom owns one of the largest networks in Europe, and would possibly be one of the biggest targets for cyber criminals because of it.

The team has a ‘enormous pool’ of breach examples or rules for identifying truly relevant anomalies; it doesn’t matter how smart your engineers are, if they don’t know what to look for they aren’t all that. Experience in being a target numerous times offers Deutsche Telekom a great sales pitch; been there, got the t-shirt, let us show you how to stop it.

“Without meaningful, efficient search rules, even the best monitoring technology will not get very far,” said Backofen. “In this context, our years of experience and regular interchange with other security specialists and innovative manufacturers are the guarantee for our customers that we can achieve the highest detection rates with a minimum of false positives.”

While profit margins in the European telco industry are taking some serious damage currently, Deutsche Telekom is doing well to diversify its proposition against the doom and gloom backdrop of connectivity commoditization.