Deakin Uni scores double win with Exabeam partnership

Australia's Deakin University is partnering with SIEM security company Exabeam in an effort to boost the university's cybersecurity degree program and strengthen its SIEM capabilities.

Deakin will deploy Exabeam's Advanced Analytics to spot anomalies on its network, and to help process large amounts of generated data.

Deakin's userbase can vary from 5000 to 50,000 users. The university uses a log aggregator that generates large amounts of feeds and network alerts. However, it was after a SIEM that could handle fluctuation and present security alerts in a way that was digestible and actionable.

Deakin ultimately selected Exabeam Advanced Analytics to streamline the alerts, analyse behavioural 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," says 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.

Exabeam has also invested in Deakin's cybersecurity degree program by offering curriculum contributions and the ability for students to gain real-life work experience in the form of job shadowing.

"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," says Exabeam CEO Nir Polak.

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.

"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.