IBM, on Thursday announced that BSE (formerly known as the Bombay Stock Exchange Ltd), the oldest stock exchange in Asia and now the fastest exchange in world, has selected IBM Security to design, build and manage a cyber Security Operation Center to safeguard the company’s assets and protect stakeholder data. Under the five-year managed security services agreement, the center will enable around-the-clock security event monitoring, event handling, security analysis, incident management and response along with synchronized management of devices, networks and applications.

Given that the financial services sector continues to be targeted by cybercriminals, BSE wanted to build a next generation security center to protect valuable digital assets belonging to the company, customers and stakeholders, while complying with SEBI & National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cyber security framework.

BSE and IBM Security Services consultants worked to define the vision, strategy, architecture, processes and organization needed to develop a framework around the five key pillars of the business – endpoint devices, network, business applications, data and users – to define how the next generation SOC will operate. It will ensure proactive monitoring of threats 24x7, detection and analysis of any suspicious change in activity, protection against emerging threats and response, while ensuring resiliency of the system. IBM will work with BSE to integrate security solutions that will add new capabilities to the SOC infrastructure, as well as, develop a new, highly collaborative IBM and BSE framework for the multi-tenant, next generation SOC.

“The end-to-end security solutions, services and global expertise from IBM will help BSE consolidate and fortify best practices under one umbrella. With the SOC, BSE hopes to pre-empt security risks and respond to them, thereby, staying ahead of security threats. There was a very competitive and stringent technology evaluation process, from which we found that IBM had the most compelling value proposition and security road map for BSE,” said Shivkumar Pandey, CISO, BSE.

“Cyber criminals are constantly evolving their tactics to succeed whether for financial gain or even disruption. In such situations, it is critical to have a security operation center approach which integrates various security protocols and technology under one roof. We are delighted to partner with BSE to help them leverage the best in class security solutions, delivering an integrated system of analytics, cognitive and real-time defences,” said Sandeep Sinha Roy, Business Unit Executive, IBM Security Services, India.