Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, just announced a new partnership with Excellium Services Group, the cybersecurity leader in Luxembourg with the goal of helping Luxembourg enterprises protect and recover their critical assets across multi-cloud environments. We have seized this opportunity to ask Sven De Backer, Managing Director at Kyndryl, and Christophe Bianco, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Excellium Services, what they saw as the biggest challenges faced by organizations and why their partnership was relevant in order to meet the market's needs.

The Perfect Match

“When Kyndryl became an independent company, we put a lot of effort on a corporate level to expand our ecosystem of partners in order to enable us to deliver better services to our clients”, says Sven De Backer. “In the past, security services were very dispersed. We had to work with a lot of different entities to deliver solutions to our clients. We wanted to consolidate the way we provide services and it led to a reflection to decide on which security services we wanted to build our own capability for, and which ones we wanted to work with a partner. When it came to potential partners, we were looking for companies with a lot of complementarities. I think that, with Excellium, we have found the perfect match. We wanted to be able to really focus on security services where a broader set of compounds are required to build the solution, realize the integration and the run.” 

“At Excellium, we are a pure security player”, Christophe Bianco explains. “When a customer comes to us, he expects strong cybersecurity capabilities and expertise. That’s what we are doing and have been doing for the last 10 years. Today, customers expect security to be embedded into the IT services they consume. Our role as a security services provider is to cooperate with a player like Kyndryl to ensure that the customers to which they sell IT services are adequately protected. The very purpose of cybersecurity is to make IT operational and efficient. That’s the reason why we needed to engage in a partnership. The history between Kyndryl and us along with our complementarity gives us great confidence in the future.”

“Kyndryl already has security services among their capabilities but, if we look at the Luxembourg market, the size and investment capacities of the local IT players put them in a position where they have to decide where to concentrate their strengths. By combining the efforts of both organizations and building a specialized portfolio, Kyndryl enable themselves to deliver high quality security services and guarantee customers that there’s a continuum between the implementation, the operation and the monitoring of the infrastructure”, he adds.

Helping Organizations Overcome their Challenges

“There are two things’ companies struggle with today : resilience and compliance. Regarding the resilience aspect, and next to monitoring and detection, we need to set up solutions that are secure by nature and design, allowing for fast recovery in the best conditions should an incident occur. Regarding compliance,  regulators are setting up more and more regulatory constraints. Our goal is to help our customers achieve compliance, not by adding an additional layer of cost but by ensuring that the service they subscribe to already meets the different requirements they have to comply with”, Christophe Bianco underlines. 

“At Kyndryl we have several people in our security and compliance competency department who are dedicated to tracking and following the evolution of these regulations. This way, we can translate any changes into actions we can take or solutions we can bring to our clients. We also invest in people that can design solutions by integrating into one offer different components like an air gap backup solution which can protect against ransomware,” says Sven De Backer. 

2023 Cybersecurity Trends

“In the future, security in the Cloud or additional security dimensions that come when migrating to the Cloud will come increasingly into play. I’m referring to the agile way of working supported by DevSecOps. Inevitably, the need for DevSecOps will rise when more companies will move their workload into the Cloud. The intersection between application and infrastructure services will be a bit more entangled”, he adds. 

“The cybersecurity trends that we see are coming from that evolution of IT adoption. Companies are facing several challenges, not only related to matters of capability, expertise or knowledge but also to how to keep up the pace of technology evolution due to the platform providers moving forward. More and more IT services will shift from internal to external services as they undergo more pressure. They won’t be able to keep affording the cost, speed of change and expertise needed to drive that. An agile IT is a must to be able to react to business needs. Being agile also mean that things are done properly from scratch and by design”, Christophe Bianco concludes.