CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) added its Enhanced Cybersecurity Services (ECS) product to the company's General Services Administration (GSA) IT Schedule 70 contract, making the service accessible to state and local government agencies.
GSA Schedule 70 is a common contract acquisition vehicle that state and local and federal government agencies use to purchase telecom services.
Putting this security service on the GSA Schedule 70 contract comes at a time when cyberthreats against all industry verticals continues to rise.
What also makes CenturyLink a key player in this sector is that it is an approved commercial services provider under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) ECS program, which helps U.S.-based public or private entities protect their IT systems from unauthorized access, breaches and data exfiltration.
Public and private entities that participate in the ECS program get access to a host of services including email filtering, domain name system protections and signature-based intrusion prevention security services. It features managed security protections that use government-furnished threat and technical information as well as network traffic patterns indicating known or suspected malicious cyber activity.
CenturyLink's timing could not be better as recent studies conducted by IBM and Juniper report a strong spike in security breaches.
In its 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study, IBM and the Ponemon Institute revealed that the average total cost of a data breach increased from $3.52 million in 2014 to $3.79 million. Meanwhile, a study conducted by Juniper Research said cybercrime will become a $2.1 trillion problem by 2019.
For more:
- see the release
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