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Singtel and cyber security vendor Zscaler recently teamed up to tackle the security challenges faced by many organisations in the ASEAN market.
Singtel managed security services director, Johnny Kho and Zscaler APJ VP of channels, alliances and ecosystems, Foad Farrokhnia recently spoke with Channel Asia to detail the intricacies of the partnership for the market.
How does the Zscaler and Singtel partnership benefit the market?
Johnny Kho (JK): For Singtel, this partnership is an integral part of our roadmap to becoming a trusted cyber security service provider. Our agile engineering driven security operations capability of threat detection and response allowed us to provide security assurance to users, workloads, and devices over any network from any location.
The ultimate goal is for Singtel to safeguard its enterprise customers regardless of business size from potential cyberattacks and data loss through a trusted partnership model driven by scalable, agile and sustainable capability strategy. Working with Zscaler, we are able to further bolster our customers’ cyber resilience through an integrated collaborative approach with best of breed security technology and operations.
The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, which the Managed Security Service Edge (MSSE) suite of services are built on, processes 300 billion transactions and blocks around 150 million daily threats and rule violations.
Leveraging Zscaler’s cloud-native platform helps our customers reduce cost and complexity in their security stack. It also enhances the user experience by delivering rapid access to required applications anywhere.
Foad Farrokhnia (FF): A recent study on alert fatigue found that more than half of the respondents received over 500 public cloud security alerts daily, and 55 per cent also shared that critical alerts are being missed on a weekly, and even daily, basis.
IT teams are facing increased dwell times and successful infections–taking over nine months on average to identify and contain data breaches. Companies need to reverse this trend given the added scrutiny lawmakers are placing in various Asian markets.
This is precisely why our partnership shares the goal of giving organisations the peace of mind they need to focus on their core business. We are excited about working with Singtel as they are a trusted partner in digital transformation for enterprises in the Asia Pacific with deep capabilities spanning the telco and IT space.
Their expertise in these areas are underpinned by a strong focus on cybersecurity.
Working with Singtel allows us to offer a broader base of enterprise customers across Asia a simple, scalable, and managed security solution in the cloud that addresses cyber risk and intrusion incidents.
What are the top market opportunities in APAC?
FF: Rising cybersecurity concerns: As APAC countries actively pursue digital transformation, businesses in the region are adopting cloud-based services, remote work models, and IoT technologies to stay competitive.
This has led to a significant increase in cyber threats and attacks. According to the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, 2022 saw a heightened cyber threat environment worldwide, with cyberattacks becoming more prevalent and sophisticated in nature.
Against this backdrop, more companies are turning to Zero Trust to help protect their organisations. In fact, 71 per cent of APAC business and technology professionals say that their organisations will adopt Zero Trust technology in the next twelve months or have plans to do so.
The rise of “work-from-anywhere” and expanded attack surfaces: According to a Zscaler report, 77 per cent of businesses today allow for hybrid work setups, necessitating secure access to enterprise applications, from different devices, locations, and networks.
Alongside the rapid growth of IoT devices, edge computing, digital supply chains and other distributed computing initiatives, the attack surfaces today have expanded dramatically and the traditional concept of network perimeter security is increasingly harder to define. These developments highlight the importance of enhancing cybersecurity and data protection while enabling a work-from-anywhere model.
The rise of generative AI (GenAI) has equipped cyber criminals to be able to create synthetic content that closely resembles real data, develop increasingly sophisticated evasion techniques, and overload real-time cybersecurity applications. 65 per cent of CEOs also think that more work needs to be done to address the growing risks in AI, but at the same time, two-thirds of CEOs around the world also believe that AI can bring benefits to the organisation.
They are seeking ways to utilise the GenAI technology themselves, to enhance their threat and anomaly detection and improve the robustness of their defenses.
What countries are you targeting with this alliance – and why?
FF: The Zscaler and Singtel partnership is well-positioned to tap into the diverse and evolving market opportunities across the APAC region.
By offering comprehensive and scalable cybersecurity solutions, we can address the evolving needs of enterprises across the wider region as they navigate digital transformation and increasing cyber threats.
Some of our plans include expanding our target outreach to other industry verticals in Singapore as well as Hong Kong and India, as well as small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore.
What are the top few challenges you expect to face in the region when bringing the solutions to market? How do you plan to overcome them?
JK: With the small size of security teams in most companies due to talent shortage, adoption and effective operationalisation of security solutions are slow despite the ever increasing threat landscape.
With attack surfaces increasing and cyber security teams facing an increasing number of daily alerts, more than 55 per cent say that critical alerts are being missed, on a weekly, and even daily basis; security teams are taking over nine months on average, to identify and contain a data breach which changed the essential solution focus from only detection to be more of prevention and response.
Through this strategic partnership, Singtel and Zscaler are offering businesses impacted by insufficient in-house resources or skill sets; an all-in-one digital security solution that uses Zero Trust principles to quickly roll out effective protection for their digital assets against cyber threats.
The managed security services overlay which augments customers’ expertise includes: Managed Secure Service Edge, technical support, change management, user account management, policy management; troubleshooting, guidance and fault escalation.
Managed Threat Monitoring includes continuous real-time threat monitoring with automated analysis to determine the level of risk; events triage with advanced security analytics augmented by skilled professionals; round-the-clock escalation and response; timely notification of threats; and monthly incident and service reports
Consulting and professional services includes on-boarding and integration of SSE into the enterprise’s IT environment; periodic review and tuning of security policies; and optimisation of security services for greater accuracy and to reduce false positives/ negatives.
Cyber security is a highly saturated market here; how do you plan to gain market share and expand your customer base in the region?
JK: As a key trusted telco service provider in the APAC region, Singtel differentiates through our capability to defend our customers from the digital edge with our secure networking services and extend this into customers’ environment through our managed security operations augmentation.
By leveraging Zscaler’s cloud-native platform, Singtel aims to jointly deliver outcome-based solutions to empower its customers to simplify their security infrastructure, leading to reduced costs and complexity as well as to maintain their security posture.
FF: At Zscaler, we strongly believe that zero trust provides a holistic approach to securing modern enterprises. Hinging on least-privileged access and that no user or application should be inherently trusted, communications between users and workloads or even workload and workload are blocked until validated by identity-based policies.
Our growing customer base is a testament to this – with over 41 million users spanning across more than 7,700 accounts globally relying on Zscaler to keep their organisations secured. In addition, Zscaler recently crossed the US$2 billion annual recurring revenue mark , logging 48 per cent year-on-year revenue growth.
We are committed to delivering a secure user, workload and IoT/OT experience to all customers – both present and future. As part of this commitment, we are investing heavily in our partner program to deliver a holistic solution that addresses the security concerns and requirements of today’s digital businesses and future-proofs security for the enterprise.
