Technology giant IBM and wireless communication trend setter AT&T announced strategic collaboration in Security domain which covers single point of network security and subsequent threat management. Being the number one wireless operator and experiencing the explosive data growth, the collaboration of AT&T offer single take away that there are security threats and hackers’ dynamics are changing from WEB to WAP. The adoption and empowerment of BYOD (Bring your Own Devices) and Bring Your Own Network (BYON) offer next wave of user adoption and subsequent monetization. The potential Managed security service offering which will have infrastructure and tools to mitigate network, applications, environment initiated threat towards consumer and prosumer information. The collaboration would enable customers to buy license and not to worry about security but to get the clean connectivity across geographies against possible connectivity medium.
Indian Service Providers must catch the hidden potential around managed security segment targeting especially to millions of SMB’s and SME’s. It would help them to increase their consumer retention as well as ARPU. Tata Communications launched Managed Security Services in 2008-2009 and was quite successful in convincing Indian Customer base including Service Providers. The problem with Indian Consumer and Prosumers base is that they are negligent about the importance of security and raises little to no noise in case of any information loss due to hacking or other security related lapses.
The collaboration can be considered as confirmed business case and should be replicated to garner best business opportunity whereas consumer and prosumer would get benefited in a cascaded manner. The proposed collaboration is nothing but the recognition to security issues more openly by Mobile operators and also their effort to protect their user base.
