"It has been a long time since firewalls and spam filters provided security against computer attacks. Today's threat picture is about completely different things, and we have taken the consequences of that." These words are spoken by Norodd Dyrhovden, sales and product manager at Tussa IKT, which offers communication and IT services to the business community in southern Sunnmøre. Tussa and Sorasec provides a unique security service for the business community in Møre og Romsdal.
Tussa has customers all over the country, and a heavy investment in fiber has further strengthened its position to the regional business community. Many of the customers belong to industries that work internationally in countries, with correspondingly major security challenges. Shipping companies, marine technology companies, the furniture industry, fish and finance are typical industries where data goes back and forth across national borders. Drawings, design solutions, plans, agreements, and strategies literally whiz between offices, and the fear that data will be lost or go astray is palpable. Cybercrime is no longer a theoretical risk, but something that affects companies around the world every single day, often with catastrophic consequences.
“We gradually saw that more and more of our customers did not take their own responsibility for IT security, but left more and more of the responsibility to us,” says Dyrhovden. “Of course, we did the best we could with firewalls, spam filters and such, but with more and more complicated security challenges, we had to realize that we did not get to grips with the big threat picture, and we started looking for a partner for security.”
Henning Gaalaas is International Sales Director at Sorasec, which includes Managed Security Service (MSS). That means something along the lines of “We build your security solution, monitor and log data traffic, ensure that all irregularities are registered and that real threats are analyzed and reported.”
Gaalaas knows most things and thinks a lot about Norwegian companies’ relationship to data security. “The scariest thing is that so many people have no conscious relationship to security at all. A firewall here, an antivirus program there and simple passwords… and one thinks that it will go well.”
Norwegian business and industry are under constant attack, and without effective, integrated security systems, one will not even notice a burglary. Computer crime does not behave as we are used to elsewhere in life. No broken windows, no broken doors. On the surface, everything will look like before, even if strangers have access to the entire business’ data traffic.
“And this is where we come in,” Gaalaas continues. “In Tussa’s case, we have built a solution that monitors the customer’s infrastructure and detects irregularities in logs and data traffic. The system identifies real threats and neglects false alarms. And our analysts take care of the real ones, report and clean up together with Tussa’s own employees.”
All data for all our customers is here, in Norway. Nothing leaves. Not only does it feel better for the customers, but it also means a real reduction in risk.
Norodd Dyrhovden
“This has become a very good solution, both for us and our customers. The close, ongoing collaboration with Sorasec makes the solution easy to understand, easy to demonstrate and easy to sell. We are of course open about Sorasec’s role in the collaboration – that they are responsible for the heavy analysis work. We are the customer’s supplier, we have the ongoing customer contact, and when Sorasec reports irregularities, it is mostly we who follow up with the customer, precisely because we can solve many challenges at short notice, and move out 24/7 if necessary, customers experience a new closeness to us s about IT provider, not least on security,” says Norodd Dyrhovden.
Both parties seem brilliantly satisfied with the collaboration so far. Gaalaas emphasizes the collaboration process as exciting, fun and informal, while Dyrhovden points to a process characterized by mutual trust and an idea that collaboration creates business for both parties and added value for Tussa’s customers. “Besides,” he concludes, “because of this we have customers we would never have had otherwise, and Sorasec has got, to put it mildly, a sparkling case for its security systems.”
