Exabeam today announced a partnership with Deakin University in Australia to strengthen its security management approach and bolster its already distinguished cybersecurity degree program, delivered through the School of IT. The university not only deployed Exabeam Advanced Analytics to help process the large amounts of generated data and spot anomalies on its network; it also turned to the security management leader's industry expertise to build out its curriculum and initiate a real-life career experience program within the School of IT.

Deakin, headquartered in Geelong with multiple campuses in the state of Victoria, is a dynamic and contemporary university with a reputation for leading the digital frontier and strongly focused on providing education that delivers the jobs of the future. The university combines excellent research and outstanding teaching with a strong focus on supporting the communities it serves. Its security posture program, known as Deakin Shield, is a major priority for the university in 2019.

Deakin's security operations team is small but agile and values opportunities to save time and resources.

Due to the nature of universities, the Deakin user base can vary from 5,000 to 50,000. The university also uses a log aggregator that generates massive amounts of feeds and alerts on the network. Therefore, the team wanted one easy-to-use, flexible security information and event management (SIEM) solution that could handle this fluctuation on the network-- and present all of the security alerts generated by Deakin's tools in a digestible, actionable manner.

After researching and evaluating the key players in the SIEM market, Deakin ultimately selected Exabeam Advanced Analytics to streamline the alerts, analyze behavioral patterns on the network and quickly and accurately identify the most critical anomalies. Exabeam is currently augmenting the university's legacy Splunk solution, which lacked these machine learning-powered analytics capabilities.

"When we tested Exabeam Advanced Analytics, we were drawn to the fact that security operations analysts can respond to alerts out of the box, without too much customization," said Deakin's Chief Digital Officer William Confalonieri. "This allows our security engineers to focus all of their time on improving our cyber defenses, instead of learning how to create anomaly detection and events correlation queries, which was incredibly time consuming. Compared to all of the other solutions in the market, the support and operational overhead associated with a SIEM solution are minimal with Exabeam."

The impact that Exabeam's technology has had on Deakin University's infrastructure is only one part of the relationship. Every year, more than 500 students pursue bachelor's degrees and training to become security professionals, a field that is constantly evolving and crying out for qualified people. According to a 2018 Exabeam report, nearly one-fifth of cybersecurity professionals said that continuous learning and catching threats were the most satisfying parts of their role.

With that in mind, Exabeam has invested in Deakin's cybersecurity degree program by contributing to its curriculum and offering students real-life work experience through various job shadow opportunities. In a job market that requires even entry level candidates to have hands-on experience before graduation, the program offers every student a real understanding of the world they are entering.

"Working with a dynamic educational organization like Deakin University mirrors our overarching vision: to dramatically improve the way that security analysts work while fostering the next generation of cybersecurity talent," said Nir Polak, CEO, Exabeam. "Exabeam has given the university a smarter way to identify anomalies on their network, and their team has given us the opportunity to mentor and prepare their students to work in the field. We are proud to be growing our footprint in Australia through this incredible partnership and look forward to watching a new wave of security leaders emerge from our work together."