Macquarie Government launches SOC-as-a-service

Will be operated from MacGov’s centres in Canberra and Sydney

Aidan Tudehope (Macquarie Government)

Aidan Tudehope (Macquarie Government)

Credit: Macquarie Government

Macquarie Government has launched a security operations centre as-a-service (SOCaaS) in order to capitalise on Australia's public sector need for cyber safety.

The Macquarie Telecom Group-owned unit claims it will offer 24/7 event monitoring and alert response to government agencies from its existing SOCs in Sydney and Canberra.

According to the ASX-listed company, the service will operate through a security information and event management (SIEM) system that will monitor workloads and events.

The operation will be powered by 120 security staff, both based in-house at Macquarie Government or seconded to government agencies. 

The service will be sold directly to public agencies, with Macquarie Government confirming it had no distributors or resellers on board currently. 

Pricing is offered as a 12-month minimum subscription service, where additional features can be activated or deactivated throughout the period.

Macquarie Government told ARN that fees are calculated based on the total number of agency IT users and the scope of the services required, including the agency’s current toolset and the integrations required.

Aidan Tudehope, managing director of Macquarie Government, said the SOCaaS would help build the “right sovereign capabilities” to aid Australia’s “war on cyber crime”.

Earlier this year, ahead of the general election in May, an unnamed state actor penetrated the networks of the Liberal, National and Labor parties, forcing Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS) users to all reset their passwords.

Last week, it emerged China was the likely culprit behind the attack, although the Australian Signals Directorate has so far not confirmed this.

Amid this landscape, Tudehope stressed the need for “strong security talent” and the “scarce resources focused on much more than monitoring”.

“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,” he added.

In order to meet the skills demand, Macquarie Government said it would expand its existing graduate program to more Australian students, providing them with an opportunity to “solve increasingly complex incidents”.

The launch comes two years after Macquarie Government joined the ranks of cloud providers whose services are certified for use with classified government information at a Protected level.

At the time, Tudehope told Computerworld that the move “heightened focus on cyber security and the need to protect data from those that are more focused on providing the other attributes of cloud computing and not so much the cyber security bit.”

Two years ago, the Federal Government launched its Cyber Security Sector Competitiveness Plan, which aims to foster “even greater” collaboration between government and the private sector.

At the time, the Turnbull government claimed the plan would triple the size of the country’s cyber security revenue from approximately $2 billion to $6 billion in the next decade.

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Tags Aidan TudehopeMacquarie Telecom GroupMacquarie Government

More about 24/7ARNAustraliaDepartment of Parliamentary ServicesFederal GovernmentMacquarie Telecom

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