OmniSOC Initiative

A rapid response to harmful attacks

As cyberthreats in the education sector continue to rise, universities are struggling to identify, analyze, and thwart dangerous hacks that can occur at any moment. In partnership with the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Indiana University is pioneering OmniSOC, a new, specialized security operations center (SOC), designed to provide the trusted, rapid, and actionable cyberintelligence required to prepare for these attacks.

Based at IU, OmniSOC uses machine learning, threat detection, and real-time data sharing across its university, government, and corporate members to help higher education institutions minimize the time between identifying a cyberthreat and responding to one.

With tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff, university campuses are really like small cities, with sensitive data and powerful computing systems that are coveted by cyber criminals. The OmniSOC enhances the work of local security professionals to provide real-time, sophisticated threat detection, analysis and action for our members.
Tom Davis, Executive Director and Chief Information Security Officer of OmniSOC, Indiana University

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.

OmniSOC Initiative

A rapid response to harmful attacks

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