In a move set to expand both Digicloud Africa and Google Cloud’s footprint across Africa, Digicloud Africa has been appointed as a distributor of Google security operations (SecOps) products in Africa.

Google SecOps cloud-native security operations platform offers a unified experience across SIEM (security, information and event management), SOAR (security, orchestration, automation and response), and threat intelligence, empowering security teams to better detect, investigate and respond to cybersecurity threats.

Digicloud CEO Gregory MacLennan says the distributorship is an exciting development for Digicloud, which was the first Google Cloud distributor for Africa and remains the leading Google Cloud reseller enablement partner on the continent.

“This is something we have been working towards for a number of years and makes us one of a very limited number of SecOps distributors worldwide and the only one in Africa,” MacLennan says.

The Digicloud Google SecOps division will be headed by David Roos, who brings 26 years of experience in IT infrastructure, messaging and security, with a 10-year background working in DevSecOps and extensive management experience.

Roos sees Google SecOps as an offering that will resonate in the pan-African market.

“Google is a security leader and they’ve made some really smart target acquisitions to strengthen and streamline their products. Importantly, it’s agnostic. So, you can start plugging it into your on-premise environments and your other cloud environments, allowing customers to be cloud native and cloud agnostic,” he says.

MacLennan adds: “We’re bringing Google level security to whatever platform you’re running on.”

Google SecOps

Roos notes that Google SecOps is a significant step towards achieving a single pane of glass bringing all security intelligence into a single window. This is made possible by Google’s unique unified data model, which automatically normalises all your security data, regardless of origin, giving analysts a single source of truth for every investigation.

“Plus, they have AI embedded natively, so you can use natural language and you don’t need to use complex querying languages. It also offers auto-AI remediation on tasks based on playbooks that you define and will then take care of the bulk of the easy work to free up your frontline staff,” says Roos.

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“Another benefit is Google’s rich marketplace. New adopters can go to the marketplace and either get multiple integrations into existing systems and existing environments, but also predefined or curated playbooks and configurations from, say, Mandiant and Google experts, which they can then import into their systems to speed up configurations and implement best practices sooner. It’s a strong community led by security experts.”

Louis van Schalkwyk, head of technical operations at Digicloud Africa, says Google SecOps addresses a need in the local market to modernise security operations centres. “Google gives you a modern toolset to protect your business assets and overcomes many of the challenges related to traditional SIEM systems, in addition to getting access to threat intelligence from a global leader. Coupled with AI, organisations can identify and protect against threat actors much faster, thus preventing the likelihood of a breach. Should a breach occur, customers can be assured that they have access to advanced incident response teams” he says.

“The product set includes tools suited to medium-sized companies, all the way to large enterprises to improve their security posture” Van Schalkwyk says.

“Because of the size and scale of Google, with Gmail, Google search and Chrome safe browsing, they have unique traffic insights on a global scale of what’s happening around the world, what threats are new and what tactics and techniques attackers are utilising. They’re able to pick up those trends and then protect customers against emerging threats. Google SecOps takes that same intelligence and world class tools and makes them available for enterprises to protect their own assets.”

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MacLennan says that Google adoption is growing strongly across Africa, and Digicloud expects customers to welcome the local availability of Google SecOps.

“The addressable market is significant – ranging from large enterprises working with sensitive data, through to managed security services providers seeking to bolster their customers’ security. Google customers are always keen to have access to more Google products and strengthening cyber resilience is a top priority in the face of growing cyber risk.”