Enhancing the alliance EY formed with Microsoft in 2015, the two companies have jointly developed offerings to help organizations sense, resist, react and recover from cyberattacks. The offered capabilities that have been developed include security services for the digital enterprise, digital identity, data protection, improved incident response and recovery capabilities and increased security in a cloud environment.

Unveiled at the RSA Conference 2017, the world’s largest gathering of cybersecurity professionals, the new services can tackle some of the toughest challenges that CIOs and CISOs face. The challenges include building cyber readiness into all aspects of increasingly digital enterprises, improving detection and response and helping CISOs support the “innovate or die” environment that so many companies face.

Charalambos Constantinou, Head of Advisory Services at EY Cyprus, says: “Cyber Security and Information Security in general is getting the attention of C-level executives and is at the top of the agenda in the board room. The alliance between EY and Microsoft offers a new platform for Cyprus based organizations to tackle the complex risks emanating from cyber-attacks and cyber-crime, while at the same time be in a position to embrace market trends in digital transformation”.

Spyros Loizou, Head of IT Advisory and Cyber Security Services at EY Cyprus, says: “Cyprus not being a target to cyber threats or criminal cyber activities is a myth. Over the past two years alone, there has been a surge of incidents reported, as service providers, law firms, banks and retail companies have been targeted through sophisticated cyber-attacks, using elaborate tactics for direct monetary benefit. During the digital era, organizations need to adapt, rethink and re-address cyber risk, in order to safeguard vital information assets. This collaboration between EY and Microsoft focuses on continued development of advanced tools that are accessible, combine timely, business-related threat intelligence with deep technical experience and cutting-edge analytics, so that organizations can protect and defend their operations, anticipate and recover from inevitable cyber-attacks”.

Marios Issaris, Microsoft Marketing & Operations Director for Greece, Cyprus and Malta, notes: “Using EY’s Cybersecurity-as-a-Service (CaaS) we can provide a secure cloud monitoring and protection service, giving our clients the opportunity to adopt the Microsoft Azure cloud platform at a faster rate. We are very pleased that EY trusted our technology and we believe that this collaboration will bring even more innovative security solutions in the future, enabling our clients to fight cyber-crime more effectively”.

Details of the new services include:

• Secure Digital Enterprise: This service can help organizations protect their new applications with secure development testing, adopt emerging digital technologies like IoT, track their digital identities and data, and provide true cloud security to help organizations build the required trust needed to support cloud adoption.
• Active Detection and Response: This new offering combines Microsoft’s Enterprise Threat Detection (MDR), Incident Response and Persistent Adversary Detection Service with a wide range of EY strategic recovery services.
• Next Generation Security Operations: Under the EY Cybersecurity-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering, EY and Microsoft can now jointly provide a scalable, secure cloud monitoring and protection service through an integrated cloud- based environment using Microsoft Azure's advanced security technologies.