NTT, Tanium partner to deploy security solutions

NTT Corporation and Tanium Inc. has announced their intention to enter into a strategic partnership to provide secure, highly reliable solutions for IT, IoT and OT environments, to support Smart World deployments.

NTT and Tanium plan to offer their areas of expertise together to provide near real-time visibility into computing devices, equipment and systems as well as provide secure management solutions for Smart World deployments (Smart City, Smart Building, Smart Energy, Smart Healthcare, etc.) across the globe.

With the rapid growth of cloud services, IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence, digital transformation has been accelerating the expansion of the Smart World, globally. In the Smart World, various kinds of devices and facilities are mixed together, and physical space and cyberspace are converging.

Escalating cyber-attacks in this sphere can have a considerable impact on social life and even human lives. Cyber-attacks against IoT devices, such as web cameras used in Smart City systems, account for almost half of all cyberattack-related communications in Japan. In the unlikely event that data processed by IoT devices was falsified, entire cities could be vulnerable to attack.

In addition, energy and medical facilities used for Smart Energy and Smart Health care are often operating in closed networks, but while these facilities can provide new added value by interconnecting with each other through smart technology, security risks increase. And, if they malfunction due to cyber-attacks, the stable supply of energy and human life may be greatly affected.

NTT and Tanium will collaborate to address these societal challenges and increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks. NTT brings advanced security detection technology featuring IoT/OT network traffic analysis, and advanced security operations using the latest security threat information.

And Tanium will contribute its endpoint management and security technology for large-scale IT environments, which has already been installed across millions of devices in large enterprises, including half of the Fortune 100.

Enterprises need the latest security threat information and the ability to understand the impact on their IT environment quickly in order to protect their organization from daily cyber-attacks.

NTT will start offering such capabilities via its next-generation managed security services by March 2021. It plans to expand in stages globally in collaboration with Tanium, whose technology can rapidly visualize the state of millions of IT assets and apply the latest patches.

The future partnership is designed to bring together NTT’s security anomaly detection technology for IoT/OT environments with Tanium’s unified endpoint management and security platform to help Smart City and Smart Building administrators understand the status of devices, and detect and block any anomalous traffic via a dedicated security gateway for IoT/OT devices. NTT and Tanium plan to offer this solution globally and aim to start offering this solution by March 2021.

In addition, NTT and Tanium plan to make the joint offering available to Smart Energy and Smart Healthcare businesses, helping to improve their disaster resilience and use of AI to deliver intelligent medical care.

Speaking about this development, Jun Sawada, NTT CEO, explained, “NTT supports promoting the digital transformation of companies around the world toward the realization of the Smart World. We believe that this future strategic partnership will accelerate the efforts of the Smart World by combining Tanium’s cutting-edge device management technology with NTT’s advanced security technology and operational capabilities. Going forward, Tanium and NTT plan to further collaborate to contribute to the realization of a smart, safe and secure society using ICT for social issues in all fields.”

Orion Hindawi, Tanium Co-CEO and Co-Founder, says, “Enterprise organizations are struggling to gain complete insight into their increasingly complex and varied IT assets, resulting in increased vulnerabilities and risk. We’re delighted to work with NTT to help organizations better identify and address high-risk threat vectors and critical gaps in endpoint visibility and control across mixed IT environments. This future partnership will help joint customers better manage assets, enhance IT hygiene and improve business outcomes using the Tanium platform.”