Brief: AT&T And IBM Accelerate The Move To Utility-Based Security

AT&T and IBM announced in February a strategic alliance to provide a set of comprehensive security services that, if successful, would define the next generation of managed security services providers. Forrester calls these new grand-scale entities "information security utilities." Security utilities such as the AT&T and IBM offering will provide a broad range of application and network security services that simplify security operations — without significant capital expenditures and at unprecedented scale. The selling point of these new utilities will be significant economies of scale and rapid technology innovation, especially in threat intelligence, event correlation, and detection. Using event data from AT&T's global network and IBM's compute and correlation capabilities, the two firms hope to create a significant cybersecurity advantage for their customers. CISOs need to pay close attention to these changes because they present significant opportunities to simplify information security operations, improve security effectiveness, and, possibly, reduce costs. Information security is now an important differentiator for many businesses, and CISOs will need to use the new information security utilities as an important tool to differentiate their business in the marketplace and to help win, serve, and retain customers.