Focusing on Cost-Effective Solutions

While reducing the cyber exposure gap, Tenable helps organizations checkmate their cyber risk across Cloud, Active Directory, IT and operational technology environments

“We are committed to a channel-driven business model, which provides partners with regular business planning sessions, enablement, training certifications and marketing support generating valuable leads for their sales teams.”

– Kartik Shahani, Country Manager, Tenable India

The Pandemic has forced businesses to shift to online operations and there has been a massive adoption of remote working culture and online learning, resulting in digitalization on an unprecedented scale. Along with the shift to online has also come an unacceptable rise in cybersecurity issues.

With rising ransomware cyberattacks on IT infrastructure, businesses have realized the importance of embracing zero tolerance for gaps in their security strategy. They are increasingly investing on strengthening their cybersecurity to secure their crown jewels and their valuable data. This has thrown open a big opportunity for cybersecurity players.

As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget,  SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cybersecurity landscape.

As part of our effort to make the voices of major security players heard by the channel community, here is the Security Predictions from Security major Tenable India.

In a special interaction with SME Channels, Kartik Shahani, Country Manager, Tenable India, reveals his organization’s strategy to address growing need for security solutions from customers, his predictions for the cybersecurity industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…

Please give a brief introduction of your company?

Tenable helps organizations understand and manage their cyber risk across Cloud, Active Directory, IT and operational technology environments.  Approximately 40,000 organizations around the globe including India, rely on us. Every organization that uses Tenable solutions is armed with visibility and insight to find out how secure they are, where they are exposed, which vulnerabilities and misconfigurations must be prioritized based on risk, how they are reducing the cyber exposure gap and how their risk posture compares to their peers.

With the pandemic still lurking there, what are the major market trends you are forecasting for 2022?

 Security to shift-left: As organizations rapidly adopt cloud-native technologies, the detection of vulnerabilities will move from reactive to become proactive in 2022. This is because, risks identified in runtime are already exposed to attackers, and fixes applied in runtime will be overwritten with the next code deployment. The only way to achieve true cyber resilience is for cloud-native infrastructure to heal itself by codifying security throughout the development lifecycle.

5G: The benefits of 5G in India are very tangible, as are the enhanced risks. 5G increases our dependence on our digital infrastructures, amplifying the negative impact on society when this infrastructure malfunctions or is the victim of a cyberattack. As we embrace 5G, we must also carefully consider the resilience and security of the systems that will utilise this game-changing technology.

AD attack paths: Behind every ransomware headline is an insecure Active Directory. A number of ransomware operators have concentrated their focus on AD as a core step in their attack path.  Bad actors increasingly understand how easy it is to gain unrestrained access to an organization’s network and gain the literal keys to the kingdom. Unfortunately, too few organizations are adequately assessing AD for security and governance issues.

The rise in online operations and huge business migrations to the cloud during the pandemic has created humongous security issues, how are you bracing to address the security challenges faced by businesses?

Enabling cloud-native security requires a fundamentally new approach that applies continuous assessment and automated remediation throughout the development lifecycle. To do this, organizations need developer-first security solutions that are compatible with their workflows to increase independence and deliver easily consumable code fixes rather than just identifying problems. Based on this need, Tenable recently announced new capabilities for Tenable.cs, its cloud-native application security platform. Tenable.cs delivers full lifecycle cloud-native security to address cyber risks from build to runtime.

 What major trends are you forecasting in the channel market?

“Managed” everything will continue to snowball: More organizations are turning to Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) to cope with the rising number of threats and shortage of cybersecurity talent. Resellers are expected to become more strategic with their offerings to have a piece of the pie. Instead of solely selling products, resellers are expected to expand their scope to include advisory-type services such as handling all the implementation and integration work across multiple vendors.

Distributor marketplaces: We expect distributors to build on their digital marketplaces, making the overall buying and provisioning experience for partners hassle-free as SaaS-based solutions become widespread. These digital marketplaces are expected to include offerings of specialized solutions in bundles that come with preset pricing and set terms. These marketplaces are being built in an effort to support resellers and entice them away from the cloud-native marketplaces such as AWS, Google and Microsoft.

Automation drives value: We’ll see channel organizations turn to automation – including solutions from robotic process automation companies so they have more time to spend with partners and solution providers.

Which areas are you focusing on in the channel – skillsets, sales and marketing, vertical and technology practice development, service capability, etc.?  

Organizations in the government, public sector, telecommunications,  financial, education, manufacturing, retail and healthcare, just to name a few, are key verticals for us.

Cybersecurity is highly tech-intensive. How do you educate your partners to deliver in this highly challenging and competitive security landscape?

Tenable has always been committed to a channel-driven business model, which provides partners with regular business planning sessions, enablement, training certifications and marketing support generating valuable leads for their sales teams. On the technology front, Tenable has bolstered its MSSP offering designed to provide customers with the flexibility of choosing strategic, cost-effective solutions and custom services to help them to manage, measure and reduce their cyber risk. We introduced deal protection on subscription renewals at a time when many vendors are taking these direct.

Are you planning any new product additions for the channel market?

We recently added a suite of upgrades to Tenable.cs, offering continuous visibility to assess cloud hosts and container images for vulnerabilities without the need to manage scan schedules, credentials, or agents. It provides Frictionless Assessment and Nessus Vulnerability Assessment for cloud workloads as well as Tenable.io container Security.

With Tenable.cs, all cloud assets —including ephemeral assets —- are continuously reassessed as new vulnerability detections are added and as new assets are deployed. This always-on approach allows organizations to spend more time focusing on the highest priority vulnerabilities and less time on managing scans and software.

We also announced a new product certification program to allow customers to gain professional credibility, validate their skills and maximize the value of their Tenable solutions. The program provides a comprehensive and practical certification for products including Tenable.io, Tenable.sc and Tenable.ot, and will enable customers to demonstrate a high level of aptitude, including deep product and technical knowledge of Tenable’s solutions.