With infrastructure security and reliability at the core of customers' requirements in cloud services, Richartz and her team will help deliver tailored support to help customers meet tactical and strategic security goals. With a dedicated team of professionals focused on monitoring and response, customers can reach a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over comparable internal and external solutions.
"Cyber security is clearly one of the biggest challenges that businesses of all sizes face today, so I'm very proud to help bring our cyber defence portfolio to market," said Richartz. "With attacks today being much more targeted and difficult to detect than ever before, customers are faced with the mammoth task of keeping up their defences amidst new technologies flooding the market on a daily basis. Rackspace has the expertise to guide organisations through this often confusing position to implementing a security solution that helps provide a comprehensive defence on top of the organisation's favoured cloud platform."
The addition of Richartz represents Rackspace's ongoing commitment to building out its managed security workforce and expertise. In 2017, the UK office will build out its Customer Security Operations Center (CSOC) where an extra shift of security analysts will support the US CSOC. This will help provide Rackspace Managed Security customers with host and network protection, vulnerability management, threat intelligence and compliance assistance.
Reinhard Waldinger, Managing Director, International at Rackspace says: "Businesses are faced with a choice of whether to invest in a team of highly skilled security specialists in-house, or turn to a managed security provider that can provide access to a team of experts, which will easily scale up or down in line with company growth. It's great to welcome Dee, as she has all the skills and experience needed to communicate our proposition effectively to the market and take it to the next level."
Richartz brings more than 10 years of security product management and solutions engineering experience to the role, joining Rackspace after being Director of Technology Alliances at IT infrastructure and security firm Verisign.
Prior to Verisign, Richartz spent several years in product management and solutions architecture roles at major European telecommunication and network providers, helping bring security products and services to market and helping enterprise customers design and deploy global networking and security solutions.
Having studied computer programming at De Montfort University, Richartz began her career in technology as a teacher, training IT professionals looking to progress their careers within the Cisco, Microsoft and A+ certification tracks. During her career, she has gained CISSP and CCSK certifications.