BLOOMINGTON, Ind.—Lehigh University has partnered with OmniSOC, a shared, collaborative higher education security operations center (SOC) led by Indiana University. OmniSOC provides 24/7 network security monitoring for its networks, conducts proactive threat hunting, and cybersecurity advisory services. Lehigh joins Creighton University as OmniSOC’s most recent partners.
OmniSOC launched in 2018 as a first-of-its-kind higher education SOC. Today, OmniSOC is higher education’s only collaborative, multistate SOC, the only collaborative SOC supporting National Science Foundation research, and the only SOC with a multistate institutional data-sharing agreement for researchers. Notably, in the past year alone, OmniSOC has added eight new partner institutions and regional networks.
Higher ed is stronger together. Collaboration through the OmniSOC allows Lehigh to respond to cyber-threats with greater speed and agility.
Eric Zematis
“Higher ed is stronger together. Collaboration through the OmniSOC allows Lehigh to respond to cyber-threats with greater speed and agility,” said Eric Zematis, Lehigh’s chief information security officer. “OmniSOC’s 24/7 monitoring and alerting will extend the reach of our internal staff to better protect the Lehigh community.”
Von Welch is executive director of OmniSOC.
“OmniSOC’s ability to coordinate across member institutions reduces the risks of a cybersecurity threat to all members by identifying threats wherever they appear and in turn mitigating them everywhere,” said Welch. “We are very happy to welcome Lehigh University and Creighton University into our membership of higher education institutions and research facilities.”
OmniSOC was founded by members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance to reduce the time from first detection of a security threat to campus mitigation. Today, OmniSOC’s members include higher education and research institutions of all sizes, both public and private. OmniSOC regional R&E network members include I-Light and Southern Crossroads. OmniSOC also supports the ResearchSOC, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Security Operations Center, supplying cybersecurity for the nation’s greatest research. Major NSF clients include the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, GAGE/UNAVCO, and the Gemini Observatory.
