Tech Mahindra partners Israeli firm to boost cyber security business
Goutam Das October 3, 2018
Globally, there is a shortage of cyber security professionals. Indian IT has sniffed that opportunity and is beefing up on their manpower, technology, and innovation capacities.
Tech Mahindra, for instance, announced a tie-up with Israel's ELTA Systems, a defense electronics company. The partnership, the companies said, would help in designing security operation centres, computer emergency response teams, and forensic laboratories for enterprise customers and the government. It would also help Tech Mahindra offer consulting and managed security services.
Research firm Gartner sees worldwide enterprise security spending to total $96.3 billion in 2018, an increase of eight per cent from 2017. Of this, the spending on outsourcing services is expected to total $18.5 billion, an 11 per cent increase from 2017. "Skill sets are scarce and therefore remain at a premium, leading organisations to seek external help from security consultants, managed securityservice providers and outsourcers," Gartner noted in December of last year.
The reason Tech Mahindra partnered an Israeli company has many reasons. The country has a dense concentration of innovative cyber security companies. In 2017, about 70 cyber security start-ups were founded in Israel. Companies raised more than $800 million in venture funding. Roughly, 20 per cent of the global private investments in cyber security are pumped from Israel, second only to the United States. The country also has many research and development facilities focused around security. Of course, the mother of all innovation is need - Israeli infrastructure is attacked three to five times every minute by cyber criminals, possibly because of its political climate.
Cyber security experts say there are five things that make for a strong defense against cyber crime: State of the art technology, robust methodology, innovation, collaboration (of the good guys against the bad), and capacity build-up. ELTA Systems brings in technology, innovation, and experience in scaling capacity. ELTA Systems is a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the country's largest aerospace and defence company.
It is early days for Tech Mahindra in the cyber security outsourcing space. But the company has client relationships and domain knowledge across many industries. The cyber security practice plans to leverage on them, Rajiv Singh, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Tech Mahindra's Cyber Security unit, said. The company, at the moment, is skilling and re-skilling engineers in the cyber security domain and its current solutions when it comes to outsourcing services includes a mix of man and machine - software bots, Singh said, would play a crucial role in security services.
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