Tackling the growing and ever more sophisticated cybercrime threats
Eilish O’Connor, chief technology officer with the Viatel Technology Group. Wearing her multiple hats as CTO, Eilish has led her teams through the growing and ever more sophisticated threats inherent in the cybercrime universe. Picture: Don Moloney
‘Hitting the ground running’ is a phrase that could well be applied to Viatel Technology Group as it continues to expand its operations across 2023.
With offices in Dublin, Limerick and Dundalk, it is adding an extra 50 permanent positions to a current workforce of 275, supporting more than 5,000 enterprise customers.
The roles will be created across software engineering, systems development and technical support within a company whose organic growth and acquisitive expansion have catapulted it from a standard telecoms firm into a digital services powerhouse.
“As we’ve grown double-digit figures every quarter for the last two years, that momentum is now putting us into a position where we can safely say we have that ambition to hire 50 extra people,” Eilish O’Connor explains.
The Viatel customer base spans a number of industries, but it is notably strong in the financial services, healthcare, and retail sectors.
“The new roles will be focused on key strategic areas, including cybersecurity — a massive focus of ours over the coming years. We plan to go to market with a really strong cybersecurity offering, which others are not really doing.
"We also have an interesting time coming up where we will be expanding our cloud capabilities, which will again put us in quite a unique position from both a hybrid public and private cloud perspective.”
Working in the technology space for almost 20 years. Ms O'Connor’s passion for Stem began at a young age, later becoming her field of study at university.
A degree in applied physics allowed for a practical base for her chosen technical pathway. Having amassed business experience in telecoms, software and investment management, she was targeted as a future senior leader, and since taking up Viatel’s CTO leadership role in 2019, has contributed significantly to the success of the group.
The coming year has also brought a further personal distinction to her career in being short-listed on the CIO & IT Leaders Awards 2023.
She was selected by a distinguished panel of judges for her innovation, creativity and key successes in uniquely positioning Viatel Technology Group as the most complete cloud, connectivity and cybersecurity solutions provider in the market.
Ms O'Connor adds that the 50 new positions may well be just the tip of the hiring iceberg — particularly given the company’s recent acquisition activity.
Viatel’s acquisitions trail included Ripplecom and Irish Telecom in 2020, followed by Nova Networks and Skytel Networks in 2021. The following year saw software development company ActionPoint also come under the Viatel umbrella, followed by broadband providers Wifiber and supportIT — amounting to seven additional investments.
“We have really big ambitions, and have been on an acquisitions trail consolidating a number of companies similar to ourselves and have integrated them quite quickly into the business.”
She adds that Viatel’s acquisition trail will continue overseas: “Over the next 12 to 18 months we are going to start looking further afield, once we start expanding globally. We are very proud of what we’ve done so far in the Irish market — even though it’s only a certain size.
"We will look to replicate what we’ve done here and really expand. We will likely look to the UK and Europe, which will open up a lot of doors for us to take our learnings from Ireland and bring them to a global stage.”
Cybersecurity is an area of significant potential for Viatel — particularly as a result of high-profile attacks on organisations such as the HSE, in addition to smaller incidents touching the lives of ordinary citizens.
"Five years ago, smaller businesses would say to us: ’Sure who would attack me?’ — whereas now we see that everybody is the target, from individuals to small businesses to huge government bodies.”
While acknowledging the obvious concerns around this growing threat, she points to its enormous potential as a major employment sector of the future.
“It’s a huge space, and one open for many different skills from highly technical jobs like penetration testing and hunting right down to the areas of compliance and ethics.”
It is a sector that has completely flipped on its head from how it was five years ago, she points out.
“Back then, the IT manager might have been trying to build a case to buy security services, only to be blocked by the board. Now, boards are saying: ’You have to do something — we will give you the money.’
"The problem now is that cybersecurity has become so broad and so vast that people don’t know where to start and they don’t know how to bring it all together.”
Wearing her multiple hats as CTO, Ms O'Connor has led her teams through the growing and ever more sophisticated threats inherent in the cybercrime universe.
“Our focus over the past number of years has been how to make ourselves cyber resilient in the best possible way. We have gone through this ourselves and know the challenges people are facing.
Viatel has added further to its sector profile with the recent publishing of Ireland’s first ‘software-defined wide area network’ report. The report looks at the maturation of SD-WAN technology — a type of virtual network architecture that employs software to manage network communication across a variety of sectors — and its future development.
The market for SD-WAN has increased exponentially, with the technology now a mainstream choice. The global market for SD-WAN was estimated at €1.6bn in 2020, and is projected to reach €25.5bn by 2027.
Its popularity derives partly from the fact its design is far better suited to how people now use the internet, Ms O'Connor explains: “With companies running their workloads to the cloud, traditional network configuration causes performance issues and terrible user experience. SD-WAN is a cost-effective way to transform traffic capacity among many other advantages.”
The technology can benefit any organisation, particularly those enterprises with a branch network — healthcare, credit unions, recruitment, retail, pharmacy and wellbeing.
“Increased adoption of SD-WAN is driven by company workloads moving to the cloud. The meaningful advantages that drive decision makers to select SD-WAN are cloud adoption, network visibility, smooth and fast deployment, and enhanced security.”
Being first to the Irish market with a fully managed service ensures Viatel now has a well-established SD-WAN estate, having first deployed the service in 2017.
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