Up to 150 security jobs to be added in Optus-FireEye APAC push

Security vendor FireEye will ramp up its local recruitment and training as it works to staff new security operations centres (SOCs) that it jointly announced this week with Singapore-based telecommunications concern SingTel through its Optus Australian subsidiary.

The new facilities, in Sydney and Singapore, complement other SOCs in the US and Ireland and have filled out the company's security monitoring and response capabilities to be able to provide 24x7 'follow-the-sun' problem resolution.

New staffing strategies are expected to help fill out the ranks of “people who are deep in various areas, and certainly a lot in the malware capability,” Optus Business managing director John Paitaridis said.

“This ever changing game is increasing all the time, so we are looking at people who have deep cyber expertise – which is a serious challenge given a global and Asia-Pacific shortage of these people.”

Up to 150 security specialists are expected to be working at the facilities, which are based in high-security Optus data centres in both cities, by providing staff from existing facilities to cross-train the new hires.

Both companies would work proactively to manage the process of knowledge transfer to what FireEye CEO David DeWalt said had become a global network of proactive threat detection, analysis and response.

The network “can see exploits coming in and deviations going back out,” he explained, “and it can share intelligence from one machine to another in microseconds or milliseconds. The ability to share intelligence in the wide network around the world gives us an advantage of speed and time.”

The five-year partnership between FireEye and Optus will see investment by both parties to build SOCs in both Sydney and Singapore, and the launch of FireEye's first managed security service in the Asia-Pacific region.

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