An Indian information technology, consulting, and business process services company has opened its first of what could eventually be many cybersecurity centers in Australia.
Wipro Limited announced the launch of the NextGen Cyber Defense Center on Thursday. The new state-of-the-art facility, which is located in the coastal city of Melbourne, is expected to create over 100 jobs.
A Wipro spokesperson said: "With the launch of this center, Wipro aims to make substantial investments to upskill its employees, hire more local resources and generate more than 100 jobs in Melbourne for cybersecurity specialists."
With an eye on the future, the company shared plans to roll out similar Cyber Defense Centers in other Australian cities to "offer cyber resilience and provide digital protection to large government organizations."
Manoj Nagpaul, senior vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan at Wipro Limited, said: "We will offer our customers in the Australian market the ability to leverage our global experience, technical expertise and strategic cyber investments to secure their digital operations.
"Our CDC will be equipped with state-of-the-art technology–enabled infrastructure with continuous security monitoring, a large pool of experienced security professionals and a global delivery model to achieve and scale highly secure integrated platforms."
The new Melbourne facility was inaugurated by Tim Pallas, minister for economic development, Parliament of Victoria, in the presence of customers, technology partners, the leadership team, and local employees.
Pallas said: "Melbourne is Australia’s leading tech city, and we welcome this investment by Wipro—a leading global information technology company. The establishment of this Defense Center will strengthen Victoria’s capability in cybersecurity and draw on the local expertise to help Wipro protect Australian organizations from cyber-related incidents."
According to Wipro’s recently released "State of Cybersecurity Report 2019" (in which 10% of the global organizations surveyed were from Australia), 55% of the respondents highlighted digital lockdowns due to ransomware attacks are their top cyber-risk.
The report found that the worldwide breach rate, calculated as the number of records stolen per second, has gone up to 232 records per second from the previous year’s average of 88 records/second.
Despite the rise in the number of security incidents, the same report found that only 25% of respondents said that they carry out security assessments in every build cycle before pushing applications out to the internet.