Palo Alto Networks Partners with PwC to Deliver Managed Detection and Response Services to Customers

By combining Cortex XDR with MDR services, customers can relieve the day-to-day burden of security operations and achieve 24/7 coverage, from alert management and investigation to incident response.

FREMONT, CA: Palo Alto Networks, the global cybersecurity leader, and PwC announced an expanded partnership to deliver managed detection and response (MDR) services to joint customers. The offering combines MDR services provided by PwC, Managed Cyber Defence, and Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks. Together, customers can take advantage of state-of-the-art managed threat hunting, protection, detection, and response service from anywhere, globally.

The Managed Cyber Defense service fuses the power of PwC's global threat intelligence, thousands of hours of incident response expertise, and advisory services with Cortex XDR, the industry's first fully-integrated detection and response platform, to provide a unique level of protection with unrivaled visibility and detection capabilities. As a result, security teams can significantly reduce attack dwell time, down to minutes, and manual day-to-day security operations workloads by up to 90 percent, elevating organizations to a mature security posture.

Colin Slater, cybersecurity partner at PwC UK, said, "Our unique market insight and trusted relationships with our clients makes us best placed to advise on their cyber challenges. Using this in-depth knowledge, we have meticulously created a service offering to address our clients' pain points. We are excited to work with Palo Alto Networks as the market demands new ways to do detection and response. COVID-19 has spurred a move to remote work at a scale that has left many businesses more vulnerable than ever to cyberattacks because they are less able to respond and recover remotely. PwC's cybersecurity team has responded to several major incursions from nation-state threat groups and mitigated cyber breaches caused by vulnerabilities introduced through transitions to remote work at scale. Preventing these attacks is a core element of the PwC and Palo Alto Networks approach."

Built to cater to organizations of any size, in any industry, PwC's Managed Cyber Defense reduces response times from what typically takes days to minutes, minimizing the likelihood of an emerging threat manifesting as a breach. Detection of emerging attacker behaviors and pivoted attack scenarios put organizations on a path to proactive defense against "the unknown," while extending protection across on-premises, cloud, virtualized, and IoT environments.

Shailesh Rao, senior vice president for Cortex at Palo Alto Networks, said, "We are thrilled to expand our partnership with PwC through the delivery of best-in-class managed detection and response (MDR) services powered by Cortex XDR to our joint customers. More and more enterprise customers have validated PwC's service over the last year in detecting and responding to cyberattacks. The combination of advisory services, analytics, and modern, AI-driven detection and response capabilities and metrics, with visibility across an enterprise's entire infrastructure, is made possible by our unmatched joint Cortex XDR and MDR service offering."