Tech Mahindra forms 30-member Cloud Advisory board; partners with Palo Alto

Pune based information technology (IT) services major Tech Mahindra has announced the formation of a new Cloud Advisory Board to help its clients accelerate their cloud transformation journeys.  

The board, which will consist of 30 members spread across three chapters in Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and Asia Pacific (APAC), will include experts from the fields of manufacturing, telecommunication, retail, logistics, banking and healthcare, among others.  

The objective of the board is to enable open communication between the participants in the ecosystem and to build a cohesive cloud adoption strategy. Tech Mahindra said that the companies in the Cloud Advisory Board have a total revenue of close to $2285 billion and spend about $200 billion on technology initiatives annually.  

While the list of companies was not disclosed, a couple of the members include Indian networking solutions provider Sterlite Technologies and Japanese food distribution giant Wismettac Foods. 

“The board will provide a vital perspective as we work with our customers to accelerate cloud transformation and help them to design, develop, and deploy a personalized hybrid cloud strategy,” Vivek Gupta, Global Head Cloud Services, Tech Mahindra, said.  

Tech Mahindra now MSSP for Palo Alto

Separately, Tech Mahindra has entered into a partnership with security firm Palo Alto Networks to become one of the latter’s managed security services provider (MSSP).  

The agreement will see an expansion of the existing relationship, which will now encompass a full suite of managed security services solutions being offered by Tech Mahindra. 

“This partnership is in line to bring global scale with cybersecurity experts along with Palo Alto’s MSSP services –covering security for cloud, endpoint, network and application,” Rajesh Chandiramani, Global Business Head ESRM (Enterprise Security Risk Management), Artificial Intelligence, Data & Analytics, Cloud, Tech Mahindra, said.

Managed security services refer to third party security solutions that are deployed for the administration and oversight for an enterprise’s IT framework. MSSPs either provide services in-house or via the cloud. The solutions portfolio ranges from niche areas to full complete outsourcing of the enterprise IT security infrastructure.  

With the MSSP tag, Tech Mahindra will be able to focus more on solutions such as application security, network security and cloud security, which can be offered under a single customised offering. Services that will be enhanced/added include posture management, risk assessment, workload protection and orchestration, among others. Tech Mahindra has already been working with Palo Alto Networks for specialized Industry and intellectual property solutions.