HCLTech with its technology consulting capabilities and Palo Alto Networks with its cybersecurity technology, and end-to-end solutions, have been working together for close to ten years.

During that time, the partnership has seen them bring their different capabilities together to drive new revenue and new business, while crucially enabling joint customers’ cybersecurity journey.

“The partnership is becoming stronger every day,” says Rashmi Vikram, Senior Director, GSI Business Development at Palo Alto Networks, speaking at the RSA conference in San Francisco.

She adds: “More recently, over the last two or three years, we’ve been providing joint solutions to customers. HCLTech has been working on a total outsourcing and managed service provider model, while Palo Alto Networks provides the security solutions.”

Joint offerings

Together, HCLTech and Palo Alto Networks have developed many joint offerings, specifically around Zero Trust architecture.

These offerings include SASE, Network security, cloud security, and helping HCLTech customers improve their code to cloud security posture.

Rashmi also notes that the partners have also worked on Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solutions and security automation for SOC.

Security solutions in action

There are a multitude of references for successful customer use cases, demonstrating effective cybersecurity solutions in action.

“One of them is a MedTech company with over 100 locations in the US, where we have provided network security solutions, as well as SOC solutions,” says Rashmi.

This company, according to Rashmi, had around 250 to 300 siloed cybersecurity tools and wanted a partner to help them on an outcome-based model to consolidate these tools to drive security transformation, whether at the cloud or endpoint.

“Another customer is a Swedish automobile company, where we have delivered an end-to-end cyber security transformation starting from the infrastructure network and moving all the way through to the cloud and SOC,” she adds.

Customer’s security demands

With the current macroeconomic headwinds, such as inflation and the disruption caused by the war in Ukraine, every organization in every industry is being impacted.

To cope with this, from a security perspective, customers are looking to security solution providers for vendor and tool consolidation to help reduce costs and complexity. And, at the same time, they want to work on an outcome-based model to deliver end-to-end cybersecurity transformation that helps improve security posture, while delivering visibility across the entire cybersecurity landscape.

“By adopting this platform approach, it provides a single pane of glass to give them a view of their cybersecurity,” says Rashmi.

In addition, she advises that organizations should increasingly look at how to effectively adopt a Zero Trust architecture.

“Never trust anything and verify everything when you give access, whether that’s to the networks, to end users or to cloud applications. This [framework] is what organizations must adopt when onboarding any application or consolidating any infrastructure.”

She adds: “Adopting security must be part of an organization’s development and every part of the lifecycle.”