Cisco’s most likely target is telecoms in $28bn acquisition of Splunk

Telcos are subject to increasingly rigorous cybersecurity regulations

The telecom sector is likely to be a lead target for Cisco leveraging its acquisition of Splunk. More rigorous cyber incident reporting is at the heart of many of the new cybersecurity regulations that telecom operators are being subjected to.

Government regulators the world over are raising the bar. They’ve had enough of leaving consumers and businesses to bear most of the burden of protecting themselves against cyber threats. They’re now requiring larger actors in the digital ecosystem such as telcos and ISPs to take on a larger share.

The UK’s Telecommunications Security Act, the EU’s NIS2 Directive and the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making on new Data Breach Reporting Requirements are just three examples.

Stronger demand

The threat visibility, monitoring, detection and response capabilities needed to meet exacting incident reporting requirements aren’t where they need to be. This is going to drive significantly stronger demand for better security operations tools from telcos as diverse as those in the U.S, Australia, the UK and Europe as well as Thailand, Tunisia and India. This trend isn’t patchy or spotty. It’s global.

For the cybersecurity market as a whole, there’s obvious potential in Cisco integrating its XDR platform and security insights with Splunk’s SIEM. As Cisco CEO, Chuck Robbins, put it in last week’s investor call, this will “help customers move from threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention.”

Putting a SOC in it

But for telco security operating centre (SOC) operatives, there’s the added potential of Cisco’s deep understanding of telecom network protocols; how those protocols look and behave when they’re behaving anomalously; and the colossal scaling requirements of even medium-sized telcos.

After the banking sector, the telecom sector is next in line for SOC updates, refreshes or root and branch ‘transformations’. Nokia, leveraging Microsoft Sentinel under the hood of ‘Cyberdome’, and Ericsson with its Ericsson Security Manager (ESM), have been the first movers in this nascent market space, aiming to bring telecom network security operations up to the level they need to be at now.

These vendors have an early start and telecom smarts in spades. But they are still in the early stages of proving themselves at scale in the cybersecurity software market. A Splunk-enhanced Cisco is just what this market space needs. It’s an important injection of much-needed competition into a critical market segment which is set to show strong growth. And for that reason, it won’t be the last.  More information here https://lnkd.in/etXsrPi4

Register here for HardenStance’s November 8 webinar on “Aligning with the NIS2 Directive: Cybersecurity Guidelines for Europe’s Telecom Operators”
https://lnkd.in/ecTBXr4X

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