Telefónica Tech creates cybersecurity and cloud academies

Madrid - Today, during the Security Innovation Days, an event organised each year by ElevenPaths, its cybersecurity company, Telefónica Tech presented the creation of a cybersecurity academy aimed at developing and enhancing internal talent with a proposal based on the education, training and certification of its professionals in the field of cybersecurity. This initiative will be joined by a similar one in the field of the cloud in the coming weeks. With them Telefónica Tech is displaying its commitment to the constant reskilling and upskilling of its professionals, promoting their specialization in technological skills that are in great demand on the market and key to the digital transformation of all kinds of organizations.

The CiberAcademy+ and CloudEX Academy have online platforms that are open to all Telefónica Tech’s professionals working in the cybersecurity and cloud business areas, regardless of their level of training, and adapted to their professional profiles (technical, non-technical, commercial, etc.), languages and Telefónica’s operations in the world in which they work. The professionals will thus be able to access the most demanding product certifications on the market and put everything they’ve learnt into practice in real environments.

The aim of the two initiatives is to contribute to the organic growth of these Telefónica Tech businesses by means of advanced internal training and, consequently, a better range of managed professional services for the company’s customers. Around 3,000 Telefónica Tech professionals will have access to these training platforms in the first phase.

“The existing gap between demand and supply of specialized cybersecurity profiles is very large and it needs to be rapidly reduced in order to deal with the increasing number of highly sophisticated threats”, declared Elena Lim, director of Telefónica Tech’s CiberAcademy+. “With this initiative we want our professionals to adapt to an ever-changing environment in order to help our customers to become secure and protected organizations with a unique value proposition”.

These educational and training capabilities have recently been enhanced by the acquisition of iHackLabs, a company that hosts virtual platforms to recreate real cyberthreat environments which ElevenPaths is now offering as a service to its customers.

As for Raquel María Ruiz, director of Telefónica Tech’s CloudEX Academy, she emphasized: “We’re going through a period of profound transformation and immersed in a digital economy that proposes new ways of approaching business and requires flexibility so as to successfully adapt to the constant changes we’re facing. Within this context, training is a key element in the evolution of our talent in an accelerated digital environment, and we also believe that encouraging the development of key competences such as the Cloud on an internal basis is in the best interests of our employees, customers and investors and makes our business sustainable”.

As part of its cloud proposal, Telefónica Tech is committed to becoming the trusted partner of its customers in a “Cloud First” world, as a result of which the human team is one of the keys to fulfilling this promise to guarantee not only the level of service it provides but also access to the best conditions of its partner ecosystem.

The CiberAcademy+ and CloudEX Academy enjoy the cooperation and support of many of Telefónica Tech’s partners in the two areas. Despite being of an internal nature in the first phase, Telefónica’s aim is to offer its customers the option of accessing these platforms in the coming months in order to train their own professionals.