The newly announced center leverages IU’s two decades of experience and capabilities from the Global Research Network Operations Center (GlobalNOC), which provides cybersecurity services to government, research, and education networks across the nation.
In addition to GlobalNOC, OmniSOC has partnered with IU’s Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center (REN-ISAC). Established in 2003, REN-ISAC’s primary mission is to aid and promote cybersecurity protection, response, and information sharing among its 580 members within research and higher education communities.
The new initiative is led in part by IU’s Vice President for IT and Chief Information Officer Brad Wheeler, who says that each industry sector requires its own unique approach for measuring risk tolerance, implementing regulation, and developing rapid incident response for cybersecurity threats.
“OmniSOC is a leading exemplar of establishing focused, sector-based shared cybersecurity services,” said Wheeler. “My Big Ten CIO colleagues and I quickly realized that we could fight these risks better and faster if we joined forces to rapidly accelerate detection and mitigation across our institutions. The idea went from concept to operations in a year, and we are already spinning up specific services that our collective chief information security officers have planned.”
In the coming years, IU plans to help scale and expand the sophisticated and highly tailored tools that OmniSOC provides to universities across the country.