The vulnerable national market requires not only end-to-end cybersecurity solutions but also specialist consultancy and support.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made technology more relevant and urgent than ever before. Enterprises will need to innovate, invent, and redefine themselves more than ever before. How quickly and responsibly enterprises deploy it, matters.
In the mindset of the Indian IT fraternity, this is being reflected in the ways CIOs and information security officers are looking for a new collaborative, secure environment. Due to the new norms, enterprises that had always been traditional IT users had started using it for various productivity needs.
Unlike other markets, India is channel-driven. Most of the companies see channel partners as trusted advisors for securing their infrastructure. The recent trend is many global cybersecurity companies entering the Indian market through various distributors after the first wave of the pandemic.
One company that had signed up to supply new key security offerings recently is eCaps. Its director K Gunasegharan noted: “Before the pandemic, most security solutions were based on premises. With the rise in remote-working, the dynamics of cybersecurity went through a drastic change resulting in requirement of solutions and products that can be implemented and monitored for work from home.”
The increase in targeted cyberattacks worldwide has also resulted in growing demand for skilled and experienced cybersecurity professionals to support the solutions. TrustCubes, WALLIX Group are some of the security providers that have entered Indian soil through eCaps.
Areas of increased cyber needs
Enterprises have responded to the COVID-era challenges by introducing measures to maintain business continuity and protect against new cyberthreats. For continuity, they have been patching remote systems over virtual private networks (VPNs) strained under increased loads.
They have been observing a surge in threat levels, including a multi-fold increase in spear-phishing attacks, since the beginning of this pandemic. Remote workers are also being flooded with attacks based on COVID-19-crisis themes that are taking advantage of delayed updates to email and web filters and using social engineering to prey on workforce concerns.
Said S Sriram, Chief Strategy Officer, iValue Infosolutions: “To ensure business continuity many organizations resorted to decreasing their office space and storage units and instead invested into colocation data centers or even cloud services. To protect themselves from an increased number of cyber threats and attacks, strong cybersecurity solutions were in demand and to make remote-working safer, remote security solutions were in demand and this led to more focus on developing these products.”
The key areas with strong demands are AI/ML based; Big Data and IoT solutions; cloud-edge security, defense-in-depth security with Zero Trust Framework; network forensics; prescriptive and predictive maintenance; user and entity behaviour analysis and many others.
Startups and SMEs also tightening up
Many security solutions firms see India as a potential market due to the increase in security adoption among the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Small businesses and start-ups are using Cloud infrastructure extensively to overcome financial crunch and are increasingly storing confidential information in the Cloud. Due to this the necessity of cybersecurity controls, practices, policies and strategies has become evident. SMEs often lack the skills and budgets to defend against cyber threats and frauds. Also, the theft of intellectual property makes them vulnerable against internal theft and hackers.
Said Vinod Kumar, CEO, Satcom Infotech: “Small businesses should be aware that, remote-working being the new normal, they should have a complete infrastructure to protect their data, such as having secured and encrypted VPN to allow remote access, activity logging, remote wipe for devices and importantly, secure email to overcome phishing attacks.”
Sustainable and scalable cybersecurity
According to Netpolean India’s director Mohan Kumar T L: “Companies are now realizing the importance of end-to-end security in its truest meaning. I would say ‘the need’ rather than ‘the demand’, has opened up the customers to go for quality products. We, as a value-added distributor, are able to help our channel partners to offer their customers with not only security and networking solutions but also extend our specialized professional services to them.”
According to Kumar, the pandemic has geared the nation in a positive way with a no-compromise attitude towards security. Sustainable and scalable cybersecurity is what India is heading towards, and the Indian cybersecurity space is seeing a lot happening in cloud-based security and AI-based solutions.
