InstaSafe’s channel strategy is focussed and built around a win-win partnership value proposition. As a young growing company, InstaSafe has adopted the cloud-first approach, consider security to be a key value-add to their business both financially and from a customer success perspective. Sandip Kumar Panda, CEO & Co-founder, InstaSafe, talks about channel business prospects, cloud marketplace and new products in 2018.
From an overall Cyber Security growth point of view, how challenging was the year 2018 for global and India market?
As we come to the end of 2018, this year globally can be summed up as a year of “More of everything”. 2018 witnessed public privacy concerns become mainstream, with the Facebook data privacy scandal splashed all across media. Europe GDPR compliance got enforced in May and numerous spectacular breaches occurred. 2018 reinforced that privacy and security are two sides of the same coin and the coming years will mark significant changes in our cybersecurity practices.
Again at the cybersecurity products space, it would be fair, to sum up as “too much complexity”. Increased complexity results in increased attack surfaces, thus providing malicious actors ripe opportunity to harvest exploits. On the other hand, today’s cybersecurity investments made by typical organizations can best be described as “cyber hygiene”.
Hence both globally & India, the growth rate of products & solutions, that made customers lives easier had ample opportunity for growth & will continue to do so.
How was InstaSafe performance for this calendar year from a global as well as India perspective?
InstaSafe posted strong revenue as we continue to experience rapid growth in our business with total revenue growing YTD 250% over the previous year. We believe these results demonstrate InstaSafe’s increased adoption in the marketplace as organizations embark on their digital transformation journey embracing the cloud. This year also marked setting up of the InstaSafe’s US establishment.
How was the channel growth for InstaSafe? What all the channel programs you had rolled out in the year?
Our Channel Strategy is focussed and built around a win-win partnership value proposition. As a young growing company, we have on-boarded and are looking for channel partners, who have adopted the cloud-first approach, consider security to be a key value-add to their business both financially and from a customer success perspective.
How was your customer acquisition growth? What were the customer engagement programs of the year and what was the outcome?
Customer acquisition was fuelled by Channel partners driving incremental revenue. We kicked off our AWS relationship and received the APN Advanced Technology Partner status this quarter. With AWS cloud adoption reaching new heights every quarter, there exists a massive opportunity for us, as Security is one of the most important aspects of any customer’s successful AWS implementation.
Which verticals embraced your solutions maximum and why?
- Financial Services & Fintech: As innovation in payments rise, enabling users and consumers become primary. Security plays a pivotal role and InstaSafe simple solutions assist customers to stay ahead of the curve in deployments, faster time to market with peace of mind.
- Retail
- ITES
- Manufacturing
Name some of the best customers and why those were best?
I would like to highlight a few noteworthy wins here. A Startup Unicorn of India needed to securely connect different AWS & Azure regions and its data center into one easy-to-manage network that scales as new applications and cloud regions are added. They explored all choices & settled on InstaSafe, as with InstaSafe Secure Access, the end user does not need to know, where an application is hosted, nor does he have to worry about access issues. For the IT Admin, Granular policy-based access is used to connect only authenticated users to applications they are entitled to access, allowing customers to keep their public cloud private.
Point out some of CIO Challenges in 2018 from the Cyber Security point of view? What was the experience of InstaSafe in mitigating those challenges?
Cloud transformation is breaking the traditional perimeter-based security appliance oriented approach. In the traditional architecture, organizations built the hub and spoke network to backhaul branch office traffic over dedicated wide area networks to the data center in order to apply security checks and access and ports. Then, they built a stack of security appliances that established a perimeter around the corporate network to secure the network. That’s why it is called network security.
In the cloud world, where the perimeter has disappeared and the internet is becoming a corporate network, where would you deploy security appliances? Our cloud platform eliminates the need for traditional on-prem security appliances that are difficult to maintain and require compromises between security, cost and user experience. InstaSafe security cloud is a cloud first, multi-tenant platform deployed across public data centers globally that secure access for users and devices to applications and services, irrespective of their locations.
What was the adoption rate of those new products you rolled out in 2018?
We launched SafeHats, an industry first security as a service solution. SafeHats Managed Bug Bounty platform leverages the power of crowdsourced ethical hackers to keep enterprise applications to stay secure against malicious/ bad intention hackers. SafeHats Bug Bounty platform is helping enterprises to connect with hundreds of highly skilled ethical hackers to conduct offensive application security testing. Each of these ethical hackers brings their unique skill set, trying to recreate the same kind of environment as malicious hackers trying to penetrate the system by discovering the security bugs and reporting their findings through the SafeHats platform.
