Bell Canada recently acquired Stratejm and CloudKettle in a move to further strengthen its cloud and security offerings targeted at the enterprise space. The moves follow what has been a growing wave from telecommunication operators in bolstering the reach and capabilities of their enterprise-focused cybersecurity efforts.

Lukas Lhotsky, president of Bell Canada’s FX Innovation division, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that Stratejm provides a vendor-agnostic security operations center (SOC) that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide real-time threat detection and response. CloudKettle is a Salesforce consulting provider that provides enterprise customers with support for Salesforce cloud services.

Both of those entities will operate under the FX Innovation operation, which the carrier acquired last year.

Lhotsky noted that the deals help Bell Canada tackle core themes and concerns the carrier is hearing from enterprise customers.

“Every CIO I speak to is concerned about getting more for less,” Lhotsky said. “How do they increase productivity? How do they drive the kinds of outcomes that their organization is demanding of them in a context of compressed budgets and then on the other side is do it in a secure way? Manage the risk, make sure it's resilient, make sure it's robust, make sure that it's secure, and we're trying to make sure that we can do those things across the broad range of enterprise segments.”

Lhotsky said that the deals help to bolster the carrier’s unique position in providing a compelling cybersecurity offering to those enterprise segments. This is based on an operator’s “underlying telco assets.”

“One of the things that we find really interesting is when you look at an operator like ourselves, there are these underlying assets that we have: incredible network assets, really significant connectivity assets, all of this,” Lhotsky said. “If you start to look at those and you say, ‘OK, how can we distribute those capabilities more easily with more resiliency and more quickly,’ the platforms and the hyperscalers become a really interesting way to do that. … It's really about taking that core asset base and bringing those capabilities to customers in new and accelerated ways.”

David Senf, national cybersecurity strategist at Bell Canada, specifically pointed to the Stratejm acquisition as a way to tap into the operator’s network reach.

“What we're bringing to market is a cybersecurity mesh that gains telemetry from the network, from the cloud, from different applications, and says, ‘OK, wait. Is that a real alert? Is that false? Is that something I need to respond to quickly, and if it is that we can contain it very quickly,” Senf said. “You can imagine a big bank with all the different endpoints they have, all the different mobile devices, laptops, all the different cloud services people are spinning up, it's hard for them to get their arms around all of this attack surfaces. I think it's really being able to say, ‘OK, has the threat actor tripped an alarm somewhere across this attack path?’ We can then say, ‘OK, let's stop them here.’ And that's really where they're saying, ‘OK, you know what? We need help doing that, because we just don't have enough people to do that.’”

This need also taps into the growing use of AI to help enterprises better manage their cybersecurity posture.

Lhotsky noted one important AI use case is supporting threat response through orchestration and automation leveraging different signals for log correlation and analysis “to make sure you are doing the next best action.” There is also using AI to help with threat intelligence.

“There is this ability to just absorb a lot of that and do some of that risk analysis as it comes in,” Lhotsky said.

How does Bell Canada differentiate? Bell Canada is not alone in moving to bolster and differentiate its cybersecurity offerings.

AT&T launched its Dynamic Defense platform earlier this year and spun off its cybersecurity business into a standalone entity called LevelBlue in May. Verizon has been making similar moves through its enterprise-focused operation.

These moves make sense as analysts continue to highlight the cybersecurity revenue opportunities for telecom operators.

Analysys Mason recently reported that operators will see connectivity-based revenues from small- and midsized enterprises (SMEs) over the next several years remain relatively flat at around $170 billion per year, with 20% of any growth coming from cybersecurity services. The research firm based this opportunity on operator positioning in the ecosystem.

“Areas such as network security and mobile security are much closer to operators’ core connectivity competencies than cloud services are, which gives operators a strong foothold in the security market,” Matt Small, an analyst at Analysys Mason, wrote. “Many IT services are easily bundled with fixed and mobile connectivity packages, but security services and mobile security/device management are the services that SMEs would most commonly consider taking from their telecoms provider.”

Telecommunication operators are not the only ones bolstering their cybersecurity offerings. Hyperscalers, system integrators, and large cybersecurity firms are also boosting their positions and taking advantage of their already entrenched foothold in the enterprise space.

Lhotsky explained that Bell Canada remains collaborative with all of those other market players but does differentiate by its ability to “orchestrate and integrate this IT estate.”

“What we see is that a lot of people are able to buy technology, but to take that technology and actually transform it into productive outcomes for enterprises is an entirely different animal,” Lhotsky said, adding that this means the ability to “integrate some of the hyperscaler AI, or with some of the underlying automation capabilities with Azure or some of the others, and really drive the business outcome that enterprise is looking for.”

“The differentiator is that we have this really unique set of core capabilities, we're able to bring those, bundle them together with this now security and/or platform and hyperscaler capability and really enrich what that means for our customers, because they don't always have all of those skill sets at the intersection of what we've built,” Lhotsky added.