Managed Cyber Defence - supporting an international retailer

This client undertakes retail in a large number of countries, and we’ve worked with them historically in many different facets, including incident response and working on a large security transformation.

Our client being a high street retailer were faced with the challenge of an evolving cyber threat landscape, so we are coming up against ever-increasing, ever more sophisticated cyber threats.

They were extremely concerned about being breached following two serious security incidents in the space of a couple of years.

They needed to implement cyber defences and ultimately protect the business, protect the customers, and protect the finances.

Historically, we would have between 8,000 and 12,000 events that their teams internally had to deal with on a monthly basis. It's around about 30 from us. We’ve been in situations where the client has had significant cyber-attacks that we thwarted in real time, literally in minutes. The solution we offered was one of our Execution Managed Services called Managed Cyber Defence. What that is, it's a 24/7 threat hunting operation where we use lots of technology automation to detect potential threats.

Our analysts are the key to the whole operation, the people who take the output of that technology and really comb through to understand what is it they're seeing and what does it mean for our clients, so that they have all the insight that the whole PwC cyber team has.

We delivered this as a managed service, that was delivered of Edinburgh predominantly with some resources throughout the rest of the UK, and our sister team effectively in New Zealand.

This managed cyber defence offering is really quite different to what PwC had done in cyber security in the past. We very much operated in the consulting space and this is very much providing that thought line and support to our clients anytime. It is a service that is really hard for our clients to replicate in terms of the scale and sophistication of the technology that we can bring to them.

The whole service is fundamentally built in the cloud, so that has many benefits. One around resilience, one around availability, and the third one is around deployment, we can very quickly spin these platforms up. They are also infinitely scalable.

Key outcomes that we’ve had as part of the service is that we have been able to detect, respond in real time to threat actors, threat campaigns taking place against their clients.

The word they use consistently is confidence, and confidence not only in the service that we provide, they trust us to have their back in amongst the most difficult security incidents.

We really are contributing to that creation of a secure digital society.