Palo Alto Networks and PwC join forces to boost cybersecurity defences

Palo Alto Networks, the global cybersecurity solutions provider, and PwC have announced an expanded partnership to deliver managed detection and response (MDR) services to joint customers.

The offering combines MDR services delivered by PwC — Managed Cyber Defence — and Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. Together, customers can take advantage of a state-of-the-art managed threat hunting, protection, detection and response service from anywhere, globally.

The Managed Cyber Defence service fuses the power of PwC’s global threat intelligence, thousands of hours of incident response expertise, and advisory services with Cortex XDR, the industry’s first fully integrated detection and response platform, to provide a unique level of protection with unrivalled visibility and detection capabilities. As a result, security teams can significantly reduce attack dwell time, down to minutes, and manual day-to-day security operations workloads by up to 90%, elevating organizations to a mature security posture. 

According to Christina Richmond, vice president of Worldwide Security Services research at IDC, "The evolving threat landscape has forced organizations to mature their security capabilities, creating opportunities for PwC to elevate their offerings and provide a blending of managed security/MDR and professional security capabilities."   

Built to cater to organizations of any size, in any industry, PwC’s Managed Cyber Defence reduces response times from what typically takes days to minutes, minimizing the likelihood of an emerging threat manifesting as a breach. Detection of emerging attacker behaviours and pivoted attack scenarios put organizations on a path to proactive defence against “the unknown," while extending protection across on-premises, cloud, virtualized and IoT environments. 

Cortex XDR is the industry's first extended detection and response platform that runs on integrated endpoint, network, cloud and third-party data to reduce noise and focus on real threats. By combining Cortex XDR with MDR services, customers can relieve the day-to-day burden of security operations and achieve 24/7 coverage, from alert management and investigation to incident response. 

Colin Slater, cyber security partner at PwC UK, said: “Our unique market insight and trusted relationships with our clients makes us best placed to advise on their cyber challenges. Using this in-depth knowledge, we have meticulously created a service offering to address our clients’ pain points. We are excited to work with Palo Alto Networks as the market demands new ways to do detection and response. COVID-19 has spurred a move to remote work at a scale that has left many businesses more vulnerable than ever to cyberattacks because they are less able to respond and recover remotely. PwC’s cybersecurity team has responded to several major incursions from nation-state threat groups and mitigated cyber breaches caused by vulnerabilities introduced through transitions to remote work at scale. Preventing these attacks is a core element of the PwC and Palo Alto Networks approach.”

Shailesh Rao, senior vice president for Cortex at Palo Alto Networks, said: “We are thrilled to expand our partnership with PwC through the delivery of best-in-class managed detection and response (MDR) services powered by Cortex XDR to our joint customers. More and more enterprise customers have validated PwC’s service over the last year in detecting and responding to cyberattacks. The combination of advisory services, analytics, and modern, AI-driven detection and response capabilities and metrics, with visibility across an enterprise’s entire infrastructure, is made possible by our unmatched joint Cortex XDR and MDR service offering.“