Rackspace has announced new managed security and compliance assistance services to protect businesses and mitigate the risk of cyber threats. These services will give Rackspace clients ‘holistic’ coverage across cover complex, multi-cloud environments, it claims.

The service will provide consultation and tailored security using Rackspace’s inhouse expertise. It can both improve security while cutting the cost of vigilance, Rackspace claimed.

The Rackspace Managed Security offering is to be backed by round the clock support from the Customer Security Operations Center (CSOC) at Rackspace headquarters and will open in October. The service comprises four elements: host and network protection, vulnerability management, threat intelligence and compliance assistance.

Host and Network Protection will protect against zero-day and non-malware attacks as well as traditional compromise tactics. Security Analytics uses a security information and event management (SIEM) system paired with big data analytics to collect and analyse security data from the customer’s environment. As part of its Vulnerability Management service Rackspace will scan its clients’ environments and tailor its responses to estimated threats. Meanwhile, its Threat Intelligence will use fuse information from 20 feeds with Rackspace’s own internal data to constantly redraw the changing threat landscape.

All this information will help clients meet their governance objectives, as part of Rackspace’s Compliance Assistance service, which offers detailed proof of configuration hardening and monitoring, patch monitoring and user observance, the service provider said.

This information, in tandem with detail about file integrity, will help cloud service managers and CIOs to keep on top of their mounting compliance challenge, claimed Brian Kelly, chief security officer at Rackspace.

“Cyber-attacks are the new normal for companies,” said Kelly. It will be a lot cheaper and quicker to use Rackspace to manage cloud services, said Kelly. “We have 16 years of first-hand knowledge managing IT infrastructure and direct experience with today’s complex threats.”