CenturyLink opens its first S-E Asia security operations centre in Singapore
Singapore
US-HEADQUARTERED communications and data services player CenturyLink launched its first security operations centre (SOC) in South-east Asia in Singapore on Thursday, to address the growing needs of enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region to handle cybersecurity threats.
The Singapore centre is the telco's second in Asia after its facility in Bangalore, India. Outside of Asia, it operates six other SOCs globally in locations including Denver in the US and London.
The company's latest move also builds on its existing operations in Asia. It already has three dedicated operations centres, three distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) scrubbing centres, four cloud connect locations and eight content delivery network (CDN) locations in Asia.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the SOC, CenturyLink's Asia-Pacific senior managing director Matt Gutierrez said: "As the digitisation of business is evolving, so is the threat landscape. Cyberattacks can result from multiple devices and locations."
Mr Gutierrez added that such threats were not merely external and can take place within a company's business and network borders through malicious or negligent employees.
Meanwhile, Francis Thangasamy, CenturyLink's Asia-Pacific vice-president of product management noted: "You are definitely going to have security risks everyday and they cannot be prevented 100 per cent of the time, but the most important thing is whether they are detected in time and how you mitigate and respond to it."
With the facility, the company aims to offer its enterprise customers in the region a greater ability to predict, protect and respond to internal and external threats through its network-based security solutions.
The SOCs monitor over 114 billion NetFlow sessions, which provide the ability to collect Internet protocol (IP) network traffic as it enters or exits an interface daily. The centres respond to and mitigate about 120 DDoS attacks daily.
CenturyLink also tracks over 5,000 command and control servers (C2s) daily and removes more than 35 C2s each month. Cybercriminals can use such servers to send commands to systems compromised by malware and receive stolen data.
In its 2018 Threat Report, CenturyLink findings showed that China, South Korea and Vietnam are the most popular targets of malicious cyber activity in the Asia-Pacific. CenturyLink also found China, South Korea and Japan to be the top targets of C2s in the region.
When considering Singapore as the location for its eighth SOC, Mr Gutierrez said that despite a global cybersecurity talent crunch, the city-state affords easier opportunities at recruiting such talent than most others in Asia.
Other factors cited included its customers - many of whom are multinational corporations - having their regional headquarters in Singapore and the value that being based here has for its growing client base of Asia-headquartered companies.
The firm also has its Asia-Pacific headquarters based in Singapore.
CenturyLink also aims to build upon the cybersecurity talent pool in Singapore and around the region.
With its global network of SOCs, Mr Thangasamy explained that its talent pool from mature markets will be involved in building capabilities here.
He said: "We have cross training programmes where staff here can learn from more matured regions and take in best practices."
Ang Chin Tah, the Singapore Economic Development Board's (EDB) director of infocommunications and media commented that the SOC will create opportunities for Singaporeans "to be upskilled in relevant industrial skill-sets such as incident analysis, management and response, and threat intelligence".
Local telco players have also been active in the cybersecurity space with StarHub forming a pure-play joint venture with state investor Temasek in September to form Ensign InfoSecurity.
Meanwhile, December saw Singtel's global cybersecurity assets consolidated into Chicago-based Trustwave's portfolio, which followed the telco's purchase of Australian security consultancy Hivint in October.
