Microsoft has today announced that it’s launching a new Microsoft Transparency Center and Cybersecurity Center in Singapore.
One of four Microsoft Transparency Centers in the world (the first opened in Redmond in 2014, the second in Brussels last year, and the Beijing center was announced just last month), the Singapore center is the company’s first regional transparency center in the Asia Pacific region. Also, the cybersecurity arm of the combined facility is the company’s first full-fledged Cybersecurity Center in Southeast Asia.
The launch ceremony was officiated by Minister of Home Affairs and Minister of Law K Shanmugam, and hosted by Toni Townes-Whitley, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, Microsoft, and Jessica Tan, Managing Director, Microsoft Singapore.
The opening of the Microsoft Transparency Center (MTC) in Singapore represents Microsoft’s commitment to enhance the transparency of its software code and improve its trust with governments in the APAC region. The initiative is born out of the company’s long-standing Government Security Program (GSP), which aims to help address the unique security obligations of governments throughout the world, and to allay fears that its products contain backdoors that allow third-party spying.
Through the MTC, governments are able to access and work directly with source code for key Microsoft products, obtain technical information about Microsoft’s products and services (including cloud services like Azure and Office 365), and receive vulnerability and threat intelligence from Microsoft, among others.
As of today, nearly 70 agencies from about 40 national governments and international organizations worldwide are GSP participants.
Considering that over 1 billion people in the APAC region are already online and the fact that cyberthreats have become increasingly sophisticated, co-locating the new Cybersecurity Center with the new Transparency Center at Microsoft's technological centre at One Marina Boulevard also makes tremendous sense. In fact last year, Microsoft has already set up a Cybercrime Satellite Center here, which is a satellite extension of the Microsoft Cybercrime Center in Redmond, the headquarters of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit.
Seeing itself as a global citizen who has a duty towards making computers and the internet safer, the new cybersecurity center will take on a more active role in driving greater public-private collaborations (i.e., roping in businesses, government agencies, as well as academic organizations) in Singapore and the region to fight cybercrime.
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