Cybersecurity solutions have become a priority in Bell’s recent acquisitions

MONTREAL — Bell’s latest acquisitions are expected to “modernize” the Canadian telecommunications company’s ability to help mid-sized and large enterprises with digital transformation and automation via cloud services.

On July 9, Bell acquired technical services companies Stratejm and CloudKettle, expanding its capabilities with expertise in professional and managed services in cybersecurity and Salesforce.

“CloudKettle is well-recognized by Salesforce in the ecosystem,” said Guillaume Bazinet, CEO and co-founder of FX Innovation (FXI), another cloud services provider that Bell added to its portfolio in 2023. “With Stratejm, security was very important to us. At FXI, we already have a cloud security offering that includes a cloud environment, but we needed a very modern security-as-a-service offering, as well as a very modern security-as-a-service operations center. That’s what we got with Stratejm, a very modern, full-stack cybersecurity practice that will add a lot of value to our customers and will also be leveraged internally.”

CloudKettle and Stratejm will report to Bazinet.

David Senf, Bell’s national cybersecurity officer, pointed to the need for organizations that could offer managed security solutions to customers. He noted that as Bell looked at the market, it saw a much greater need for security services, both standalone and embedded in other solutions.

“At Bell, we have an IoT offering and a cloud offering with FXI, and a huge number of connectivity offerings, so we wanted to integrate security into those offerings as much as possible,” he explained.

Senf also noted the need to create a platform that gives Bell the flexibility to quickly respond to the emergence of new vendors and solutions across multiple domains.

“Security is about network security, application security, identity, IoT security, and cloud security,” he said. “So that we can have complete visibility into an attacker at any of those points and as they move through those different points, this modern platform enables a very efficient security operations center. What that means for our customers is that we’ll be able to respond much faster to specific threads in the broader environment and add new capabilities, so as a customer adds new capabilities, we can keep up with them.”

Bazinet shares Senf’s view on the importance of increasing Bell customers’ resilience to cyberattacks by adding CloudKettle and Stratejm.

“This is so important to all CIOs and all our customers,” he said. “You can’t think about transformation and modernization for a customer without offering them cybersecurity that spans the entire digital world. For us, this has been part of the strategy from the very beginning, to have strong cyber practices that support all of our digital transformation practices that help our customers modernize, innovate and be more competitive.”