Palo Alto Networks and Deloitte Deepen Partnership to Offer Managed Security Services

Highlights –

• Managed services will be a boon for in-house security teams as they will be able to call on external support to enhance their security outcomes.
• With this partnership, both firms aim to provide support to modern security teams by granting them instant access to managed third-party support.

Global cybersecurity leader Palo Alto Networks and Deloitte announced the extension of their strategic partnership to offer a new suite of managed security services to joint US customers. This means Palo Alto Networks’ technologies will now be available to customers as part of managed offerings offered by Deloitte.

Practically speaking, mutual enterprise and government customers can leverage managed security support with networking, user access, data security, workload security, device security, orchestration and automation, telemetry, and analytics.

As for enterprises, these managed services will be a boon for in-house security teams as they will be able to call on external support to enhance their security outcomes.

Empowering in-house security teams with a managed security service

The current development comes close to Deloitte Cyber and Palo Alto Networks forging a strategic alliance in July of last year to deliver integrated security solutions to mutual customers.

It has also come at an appropriate time when modern security teams are finding it difficult to maintain pace with the demands of modern cybersecurity, with more than 71% of SOC analysts experiencing burnout.

With this partnership, both firms aim to provide support to modern security teams by granting them instant access to managed third-party support.

“Cybersecurity solutions can be challenging and costly to build in-house,” said Kieran Norton, Deloitte risk and financial advisory infrastructure solution leader and principal.

“These outcome-based services from Deloitte help enterprises address constantly evolving cyberthreats with managed secure access service edge (SASE), cloud, and threat detection and response capabilities.”

Norton elaborated that the firm’s core managed services will include managed zero trust, cyber defence, cloud automation, orchestration, and 5G as dedicated offerings through Deloitte’s multi-tenant cloud platforms, such as the organization’s cloud managed services offering as well as client-dedicated platforms.

The new solution offered as managed services will include the following:

• Zero trust enterprise enablement: It merges cyber technology platforms and professional services to accelerate organizations’ adoption of zero trust.
• Multi-cloud automation and orchestration: It’s a combination of Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud and Cortex XSOAR and Deloitte’s cloud security controls framework and library of cloud security use cases. It provides comprehensive security orchestration and automation.
• Managed cyber defence: Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud and Prisma Cloud Compute solutions will be embedded in Deloitte’s OpenCloud to provide threat detection, prevention, attack surface management, and security automation capabilities. All of it is offered in one integrated, multi-cloud platform.
• Cyber 5G: It combines the companies’ 5G security blueprints, readiness, and integration services aligned to private, public, and hybrid deployments of 5G networks.

Managed services market in brief

With more and more organizations seeking to extend the capabilities of their in-house security teams with external support, it isn’t surprising that the managed security service market is witnessing growth.  Experts anticipate that the managed security services market will grow from a valuation of USD 22.45 billion in 2020 to reach USD 77.01 billion by 2030.

This is not to say that Palo Alto Networks and Deloitte are the only players wanting to capitalize on the growing need for managed service support.

Only last week, Microsoft (announced revenue of USD 49.36 billion last year) forayed into the market with a new managed service offering called Microsoft Security Experts, which provides enterprises with services such as external threat hunting, incident response, and modernization support.

IBM is yet another competitor that offers a mix of managed security services, including threat management, managed detection and response, managed cloud security, managed endpoint security, managed identity, and many more. Only recently, the firm announced that it had raised USD 14.2 billion in revenue.

What makes Palo Alto Networks and Deloitte’s managed service solution stand out in the competition is that it’s targeted toward mutual Palo Alto Network and Deloitte customers.