RIYADH – Mobily, in cooperation with IBM, launched the world-class Managed Security Services (MSS) for the business sector in Saudi Arabia in order to mitigate the impact of security breaches and 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. 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. 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 helps 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. 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.” Mobily and IBM signed a 5 year alliance partnership agreement in August 2012, which allows Mobily to exclusively provide MSS services to Saudi market, and perform daily operations through the Mobily-IBM Security Operations Center (SOC) that is located in Mobily's Tier IV certified data center in Riyadh. — SG
