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SOC-as-a-service launched by Macquarie Government

The security operations centre offering has been launched to address the threats government agencies are faced with.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor

Macquarie Government has on Thursday announced a new offering, a security operations centre as-a-service (SOCaaS) targeted at government agencies in Australia.

According to Macquarie Government, which is part of the Macquarie Telecom Group, the new centre will provide full cybersecurity coverage, including 24/7 event monitoring and alert response.

"Government agencies often struggle to attract strong security talent and they need these scarce resources focused on much more than monitoring," Macquarie Government MD Aidan Tudehope said.

"SOCaaS places that role in the hands of reliable professionals whose sole job is to manage it, freeing government resources to focus on other security tasks."

The company touted its SOCaaS as "enhancing Australian sovereign cybersecurity capabilities".

Macquarie will also be expanding its existing graduate program, aiming to give participants experience with the new service through responding to and solving, complex incidents.

See also: UNSW professor wants to see more 'rascals' taking up cyber

"Building the right sovereign capabilities is vital both to our ability to hold ground in the war on cybercrime and remain competitive in an increasingly digital economy," Tudehope continued.

Macquarie Telecom received Unclassified DLM certification for its GovZone (launch) offering in March 2017 from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). Macquarie Telecom's managed cloud service had initially been given the security tick by the ASD in May 2015, making it the first Australian cloud provider to be listed on the federal government's certified list.

Speaking with ZDNet earlier this year about the Australian government's shift to the cloud, Tudehope said he would argue that it isn't enough to simply move to the cloud in a "forced march" as it may leave government, as well as private sector, with a cloud provider lock-in situation.

"The challenge at the moment for government is that they see the shiny lights of some cloud providers and often go in heavily with one particular provider," he told ZDNet.

"The problem then is they get locked in and if you've got a long term project that needs to be rolled out in many phases ... the decision to go with one cloud provider upfront may have made sense, but by the time the rubber hits the road and it starts to deliver citizen services, that answer may have changed and they may no longer be the right one."

He said what has perhaps happened within government is that those who were early adopters of public cloud saw the "bling bling" -- the shiny lights -- of the promise of public cloud and went in early, not realising they may have just shifted to a cloud-based version of a proprietary environment.

For the first half of the 2019 financial year, Macquarie Telecom reported AU$8.3 million in after-tax profit, an increase of 4% over the AU$8 million reported for the first half of the 2018 financial year.

EBITDA was up 13% to AU$25.5 million, while revenue was AU$119.6 million, up 4% year on year.

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