Rackspace Technology Helps Secure Organisation With Flexible Security Options

 Sandeep Bhargava, Managing Director of Asia Pacific/Japan (APJ) at Rackspace Technology talks to Enterprise IT News about securing organisations.

EITN: Do you have many security service offerings? How does your latest offering, Rackspace Elastic Engineering, complement the rest of your security portfolio? How does it complement your customers existing security strategies and solutions?

Sandeep Bhargava: Many organisations find it challenging to keep up with the constantly shifting security landscape where cyberthreats continuously evolve. This is especially so in today’s environment where organisations are implementing multi cloud, hybrid strategies. It is critical, therefore, for companies to work with proven partners who bring a holistic security approach to strengthen and secure their IT environments.

Rackspace Technology’s security solutions portfolio including Cloud Native Security, Application Security, and Network Security, provides the security plan, detection and responses, advanced monitoring and resolution and the elastic engineering needed to implement a secure and agile cloud strategy.

For instance, with Rackspace’s Cloud Native Security, cloud environments are monitored continuously for security vulnerabilities and threats. Using a set of preapproved actions, Rackspace acts immediately to isolate the detected vulnerability and eliminate or minimise the possible damage.

Depending on their specific security and compliance requirements, our clients select and pay for the services they use. As Rackspace offers a comprehensive range of security and compliance solutions applicable for all major private and hyperscale public clouds, our clients have the flexibility to choose from our service blocks containing discrete sets of capabilities.

As the latest addition to our security product offerings, the Rackspace Elastic Engineering (REE) provides an end-to-end digital transformation for security, modernising business security strategy and cloud security operations. Clients are assigned dedicated Elastic Engineering Security Pod Partners to work with the business every step of the way. Each security pod includes an engagement manager, a pod lead and lead architect, security architects, security engineers, a compliance expert and security analysts or penetration testers.

With REE, businesses can assess, architect, implement, engineer, monitor, manage, and respond to complex security and compliance challenges. In addition, these capabilities will empower organisations to resolve the following challenges:  

1. Address the growing execution and operational gap brought about by working with multiple security providers and partners.

2. Break free from traditional reactive approaches to security with an agile, proactive, end-to-end security service that continually improves the company’s security posture.

3. Take the next step towards digital transformation with a security partnership designed for modern cloud architectures.

EITN: Do you see a gap that you want to address with your service offering? Please detail a bit more about this lack, why it happens, and how you can help.

Sandeep Bhargava: As customers continue with their cloud journey and markets embrace a cloud-native mindset, IT organisations must learn to navigate and understand entirely new architectural methodologies and adopt new ways to deploy, monitor, and operate IT environments. There is also an urgent pressure for IT teams to develop expertise around new technologies including containers, serverless, Internet-of-Things (IoT) and machine learning.

Most organisations, however, are unable to match the speed and scale of technological development and acquire the digital skills needed to ensure the success of transformation plans.

As organisations pursue this, they need help in understanding how to scale their IT organisation in an agile world. Moreover, to accelerate innovation and embrace modern cloud operations, organisations today need more than traditional Managed Service Provider (MSP) models.  

As a multicloud technology services organisation, Rackspace Technology provides flexible managed services options and access to a pool of specialised experts to implement modern cloud infrastructure.

Customers recognise that instead of hiring and managing a multi-disciplinary team of engineers to realise their cloud strategies, partnering with Rackspace is a more efficient and productive way to evolve into a native cloud organisation.

Not only do we provide deep cloud expertise, which is on-demand without long-term commitments but more importantly, customers get access to our dedicated team of cloud engineers, who work as an extension of the customer’s team to shape outcomes as they evolve into a cloud-native organisation.

EITN: Why do you say that Rackspace has a deep understanding of its customer environments, and have expertise in managing end-to-end security lifecycle? How are you different from a security operations centre?

Sandeep Bhargava: At Rackspace Technology, we work closely with our clients to gain understanding of their cloud security needs and take a flexible approach to workload placement across clouds. Our customers gain access to programs that can assist in accelerating their transformation projects. With expertise across the world’s leading technologies — across clouds, applications, data and security — our solutions and services enable our clients to grow their business, increase efficiency and deliver the future.

We have a variety of security solutions including Cloud Native Security and REE security, which complement the security needs of our customers. Our professional managed security services provide support to four primary technology stacks — AWS, Microsoft® Azure®, Google Cloud Platform™ and VMware. Rather than the traditional public-vs-private cloud approach, we take a technology-stack-centric view of our client’s cloud security requirements, and using this framework, we assist them in implementing the technology stack that meets their business needs.

Our deep technology partnerships with leading technology vendors ensure that the best-in-class solutions are delivered to our customers.

Rackspace Security Essentials combines industry-leading global security expertise from our global Security Operations Centre (SOC) with the advanced threat detection capabilities that businesses can rely on to protect all their cloud environments around the clock. Some of the key benefits that customers achieve through this offering are:

• 24X7X365 Incident Response by GIAC-Certified Incident Handlers
• Advanced protection against cyber-threats through an integrated suite of security capabilities
• Security controls mapped to compliance standards such as HIPPA, PCI DSS and GDPR
• Increased protection against Advanced persistent threats (APTs) with additional features for host-based endpoint detection and response

EITN: What are the security tools and frameworks you would typically use to help customers secure cloud security and adhere to compliance? Is there any other player out there that offers what you do?

Sandeep Bhargava: Today, we offer a range of assessments and tools to help identify gaps in an organisation’s IT environment. We can also formulate recommendations and steps to help businesses optimise their cloud security strategies, enabling companies to meet the security and compliance mandates that are important to their business.

Through Rackspace Technology’s advanced security monitoring, customers have access to a pod of security experts who will work with them to assess, implement, engineer and manage their security and compliance challenges. This concept provides on-demand, agile, proactive, end-to-end security services that are constantly improving security postures.

Bringing these skills together, we offer companies a pod concept through our REE solution where they can leverage eight or nine skills. With great flexibility, customers can access the service in 25, 50, up to a 100 hour-tier and mix and match the skills they need on a monthly basis.

With the increasing security threats and cyber attacks and increased risks of data breaches as more data is uploaded to the cloud, security across the enterprise IT environment is something that simply cannot be ignored.