March 22 (SeeNews) - France-based IT group Atos said on Tuesday that it opened a Security Operations Centre (SOC) in the Bulgarian capital Sofia as part of the continuous expansion of its cybersecurity activities.
With the opening of the new centre, Atos' sixteenth SOC worldwide, the company expects to hire over 50 cybersecurity professionals in Sofia in 2022, to join the 1,500 Atos employees already working in Bulgaria and its worldwide network of 6,000 security experts, the group said in a press release.
The company did not disclose the size of the investment in the centre.
"The investment is mainly in hiring over 300 experts to work in the centre in the next couple of years and expanding its capacity," Debora Apostolova, communications expert at Atos Bulgaria Competency Center, told SeeNews.
The Sofia SOC is designed to rapidly identify and limit the impact of security incidents for large organisations globally via constant threat monitoring, detection, and targeted response supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology, the company noted.
"Atos intends to meet the sovereignty needs of public and private organisations, notably those operating in critical and sensitive industries, by offering them an additional AI and ML-powered SOC located in Central Europe, in addition to those in Croatia, Poland and Romania," the group also said.
With the increase in demand of Europe-based clients, including in Bulgaria, it seemed natural to open a new SOC and base it in Sofia, where Atos already has a strong team of digital transformation experts, said in the press release Chris Moret, senior vice president and global head of cybersecurity services at Atos.
Atos’ global network of SOCs processes 31 billion security events per day, according to the press release.
Atos is present in Bulgaria through its local units Atos IT Solutions & Services and Atos Bulgaria Competency Center. Atos IT Solutions & Services supports over 20 business functions and more than 1,000 processes by providing end-to-end services to Atos’ entities and also delivers business communication services for customers in over 40 countries worldwide. Atos Bulgaria Competency Center offers innovative IT solutions for international companies in the consumer-packaged goods sector and food and beverage industry, including SAP solutions for corporate clients.
Last year, Atos fully delivered and assembled Bulgaria's new European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking supercomputer at Sofia Tech Park.
Atos is a global leader in cybersecurity, cloud and high-performance computing with 105,000 employees and annual revenue of over 11 billion euro ($12.1 billion). It provides tailored end-to-end solutions for all industries in 71 countries.
($ = 0.9066 euro)