The cyber world is seen as a risk but for many companies it is also an opportunity. This is the case of four large German companies that in November 2015 decided to team up to defend themselves and offer their services, these are Allianz SE, BASF SE, Bayer AG and Volkswagen AG, united under the name "Deutsche Cyber-Sicherheitsorganisation" (German Cybersecurity Organization) or, in short, DCSO.
The need to face the increasingly complex new challenges and the speed of change in the technological sector leads to aggregation and so the DCSO was born. The main activities include:
- technology scouting, that is the identification of emerging technologies, the gathering of information on the latter and the channeling of information within the organizations that can use it as well as the support in their acquisition;
- threat detection, or the identification of threats, in particular those relating to APT;
- next generation solutions, to search for next-generation cyber security solutions;
- auditing;
- incident response;
- advice.
Some brief considerations
The four Big German companies are not companies that are among those that are normally considered of the sector, yet each of them has its good reasons.
The first, Allianz SE, is a financial services company known to the public for insurance services. In this case, both the need to learn more about the nascent cyber insurance market and the need to protect its networks and managed data may have pushed the European giant (130 billion euros in turnover in 2018, 140.000 employees, a profit net of about 7 billion euros) to deal with the sector.
Volkswagen AG could not be missing, both because there have been collaborations with Allianz SE for more than sixty years, both to improve knowledge of the sector and in view of new technologies applied to the automotive sector.
BASF SE, one of the largest chemical industries in the world (62 billion in 2018 turnover, around 130.000 employees, 4.7 billion euros in net profit), has chosen to participate in the alliance, probably also driven by the need to protect their corporate networks from the growing international threat. The growth of attacks on large companies for the purpose of theft of trade secrets is in fact growing, as is the whole sector.
Finally, Bayer AG, one of the main pharmaceutical companies (around 40 billion euros in 2018 turnover, 111.000 employees, around two billion in profit), driven, I imagine, by the same considerations as BASF.
Naturally, the alliance is also important for the German government, which thus benefits from the attractiveness of the companies and their experience in the various production sectors, thus pushing the development of the national cyber sector. Even if it is still a young company, the conditions for rapid growth in the cyber world are all there.
To learn more:
- https://dcso.de/de/about-us/
- https://www.politico.eu/article/germanys-cyber-security-chief-on-hacking...
- https://www.basf.com/global/de/media/news-releases/2015/09/p-15-342.html
Image: DCSO Deutsche Cyber-Sicherheitsorganisation GmbH
