As cyber security threat in India is growing rapidly, it necessitates innovation at the solution layer and software defined protection is becoming more a buzzword. SME Channels spoke to Rajat Sahu, Vice President- Marketing & Alliances at InstaSafe Technologies Pvt Ltd. to understand the strategy.
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“SDP Security is based on the Zero Trust principle, that defines, “Deny all and allow only Trusted devices” to network,”
Rajat Sahu
Vice President- Marketing & Alliances
InstaSafe Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
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What is the state of security in India?
The state of security can be defined in two ways in India, there is an awareness among the stake holders for the need of security and to protect the critical data and networks. But on the other hand, there lacks some commitment towards prioritizing the IT security and budget for it. Many of the large enterprises are still looking at the conventional methods of security to stay protected or sometimes a take a piecemeal approach which is a little worrisome.
Though there are clear cases of security breaches, due to the brand reputation loss many times these are brushed under carpet or kept secret. Few of the forward looking organizations are now looking more proactively at security due to the external pressures being built by the regulatory and compliance needed by other countries, such as GDPR – which pushed many businesses trading with EU to adopt security measures. Similarly the recent RBI, SEBI guidelines has also started pushing organization to be compliant. But that is just half of the story. As security itself needs to be thought as the corner stone of any enterprise architecture be it a B2B or B2 business to not only protect the data but also to safeguard business losses in the competitive environment.
What are some of the major challenges you see for the Indian market from the security point of view?
As stated above the lack of clear guidelines and standards, which need to determine the security as a major issue, has to be addressed on a priority basis. The government policies and legal processes need to be established to deal with security and the breaches.
As the cyber attacks keeps getting more bolder and sophisticated, the challenge to keep up to it with a huge gap in skill set availability will prove to be a major challenge. Further, the espionage and cross border cyber war will intensify, which could cause collateral damages for large organizations, utility and government agencies. The growing challenge to maintain a repetitive edge will be a larger concern for many organizations, with cyber attackers now adapting to data manipulation more than theft.
In this back ground stronger policy and guidelines are essential with focus on enhancing skilled workforce to supplement the same.
With recent security breaches like WannaCry, has this made people more aware of the importance of security today?
Yes, as specified earlier, there is a growing awareness about the challenges faced by ransomware and most organizations today started adopting the back up on regular basis to mitigate these risks. As the ransomware are becoming stealthier and sophisticated, the security solution providers are looking at more proactive mitigation of the attacks, to prevent large scale damages.
Can you tell us about the latest technology and solutions from your company and the impact in the market?
InstaSafe is one of the handful of developers of (Software Defined Perimeter) SDP security in the world today and with more than 100 Fortune 500 companies trusting its solution, it has reinvented the conventional way of security. From multiple dash board management, InstaSafe has made a single web-based management console that can effectively monitor and manage large distributed networks.
Instasafe Secure Access – SDP Security is based on the Zero Trust principle, that defines “Deny all and allow only Trusted Devices” to network after it is Authenticated and allows only authorized assets within network, while restricting all other assets within the network invisible to the users, apart from eliminating the publishing of application IPs over the Internet completely. Thus, providing a strong protection against Spoofing, MITM, DDoS to APT attacks.
Our esteemed users have endorsed that ISA has reduced their IT operational challenges by more than 35-40%, while the TCO is reduced by 25%. Being a SaaS security solution it also eliminates the challenges of hardware maintenance and management periodically to keep the networks safe and secure.
What will the threat landscape look like in over the next 12 months?
With the fast adoption of IoT to cloud, the cyber attacks have also changed their way and patterns that is creating a larger challenge for the organization to be more alert and proactive to counter these attacks and be vigilant. Hence, the demands for EDR to SOC have now been growing faster than anticipated.
As mentioned before the kind of attacks such as Cyber Espionage to data manipulations to targeted attacks are expected to increase manifold. While the known actors like the ransomware, phishing, vishing, Malware will also be growing by creating complicated methods to monitor and manage networks from multiple fronts.
What will be the biggest drivers for security spending in 2019?
Technology adoption across segments are now de facto irreversible, that poses serious threat to most of the devices such as IoT which are not standardized or tested for various security challenges they bring with them. While the adoption of IoT has remained well ahead of the cusp in terms of the usage, the IT security of these have not yet caught up at the same speed, thus creating a huge gap.
While cloud is also driving the multi cloud environment for users that has slowly broken the security perimeter for the organization. In such scenarios, the organizations are grappling with the challenges to fix the holes created by diversified networks and 24 x 7 business demands that put them at huge risk due to exposure to security threats at multiple fronts.
These are some of the factors that will be driving the IT security demand, and growth.
How do you see India as a market for your solutions?
India has been always a late adopter of technology and still at nascent stage when we look from our solution offerings. Having said that, as the analysts have predicted more than 10% of Indian market will adopt SDP Security for their network protection from security threats. We have seen a continuous growth momentum for our product and solutions by mid to large organization. As SDP security simplifies the complex network security demands with conventional methods.
Tell us about your Go-to-market strategy. How do you empower your channel partners? Which factors do you take into account while increasing your partner’s foot print?
Instasafe’s SDP Security is one of the handful technologies available today and we are been very actively promoting the same among the technology decision makers through various platforms at expos to events and conferences. Today our partner network has grown to more than 30 national & international SI partners in India and EMEA markets. That has resulted in our reach increasing by more than 600% among the potential customer base, apart from our close association with leading cloud vendors as their ISV partners.
What is your focus in the market – Channel market or CIOs/ CISOs?
We are been looking at both the segments simultaneously, as Channel is the key to our business growth, but simultaneously we work with CIOs/CISOs to build the mindshare towards moving to a new age solution from the conventional mode of network and IT security.
Hence, as said above we are working closely with our channel ecosystem, being one of the few pure SaaS solution providers to empower and expand our reach and add growth.
Describe some of your biggest successes in India.
To name a few of our success stories, apart from the utility and government agencies that have adopted ISA solutions, some of the leading industry leaders in Finance & MicroFinance, Retail, Logistic, IT & ITeS, and Manufacturing segments are our esteemed customers from the last couple of years.
In this crowded security market, what sets you apart from the competitors?
As mentioned before being one of the handful developers of SDP security solution, we have hardly any direct competitors. Again being a disrupter the way conventional network security is seen, we see some indirect competition from few players. To back the statement, various industry’s leading analysts have only recently categorized SDP Security or Zero trust network, though InstaSafe Secure Access solution has been in existence with more than 100+ enterprise customers.
