A Transformational journey

The past year has been one of the most exciting and challenging of my entire career. Not only did we have to manage the impact of COVID-19, but for the past 18 months the NTT Security organization has been undergoing a fundamental transformation.

The organization that is now the security division of NTT Ltd. has been a part of my career for the better part of 15 years. I joined the company when it was known as Datacraft Asia as part of the team building out their security practise.

While this was part of my personal journey, the company was also in the process of transforming itself in order to meet evolving market demands. Back in the mid-2000s the nature of security was fundamentally changing as more and more companies began to understand the importance of security. They were starting to embrace the internet as a critical part of their IT infrastructure. We were able to leverage our partnerships with key IT vendors and our ability to use our skills to grow the business from a USD 40 million organization into a USD 100 million business.

At that point I was asked to take on a global role in Dimension Data’s security solutions team, moving into a role that involved setting goals and strategy for what was then a rapidly growing global business.

An evolving landscape

Just as I was evolving, the company was changing as well. We were seeing the nature of cyber-crime shift towards the current trend of well-organized criminal syndicates acting as the driving force in criminal activity, and we needed a global response. As part of that we started our move into managed security services, first in Australia and then expanding the offing globally.

In 2016 we launched NTT Security and began to focus our efforts on building platforms to help our clients manage their security estates.

Last year marked the next stage in the evolution of the organization with the creation of NTT Ltd. With the integration of 31 different entities, the role of the security division shifted to ensuring that not only can we deliver security services to our clients but, in addition, we needed to provide the requisite security for the multitude of solutions and services provided by the rest of the company.

Driving value

At the same time, we needed to adapt as an organization and show our clients that their needs come first. 

As in any merger, the first year is critical in ensuring that the new organization can deliver a better quality of service while increasing operational efficiency. This value capture exercise meant that we needed to do an in-depth analysis of the resources we had and explore ways to enhance value without impact on customer experience. 

This meant that we moved five separate platforms onto one global platform, and from 10 SOC locations to six. All the while we had to make sure that we were still complying with the various data residency regulations.

We’ve now got the team and platforms in place to allow us to accelerate the business and focus on delivering even greater value to our clients. 

While we believe that across the IT environment there needs to be a trust relationship between the client and their service providers, in the security realm this is even more important. As we take on more and more responsibility for managing our clients’ security environments, they have to implicitly trust that we have their best interests at heart.

Just as my career with NTT Ltd. has evolved over time, we continually adapt to meet the needs of our clients, guiding them as they move along their digital transformation journey.