"SMEs Today Cannot Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Current Cyber Threats"

"SMEs Today Cannot Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Current Cyber Threats"

SMEs are growing at a good space in India currently but securing their digital assets remains bigger challenge for them. After rise in recent cyber-attacks, companies are increasing their security budgets to invest in deploying secured solutions. Paladion Networks is one of the market players that provide security solutions. Mr. Sunil Gupta, President and Chief Operating Officer at Paladion Networks talks with DT about the cybersecurity market and their initiatives to keep SMEs secure from cyber threats.

DT: How is the current Cybersecurity Solution Market in India? What are the latest trends in the market? 

Mr. Sunil: India is changing very fast and post demonetization digital penetration has increased manifold. This extraordinary increase in internet penetration reveals the true scope of digital services. Over the years, the nation has performed exceptionally well with regards to its advance in the digital domain. This includes initiatives such as Digital India, Aadhaar Card, digital locker, digital life certificates, and digitization of other government-led services such as MNREGA. Other initiatives such as BharatNet, which seeks to make high-speed internet available in more than 200,000 villages in India, are also building the much desired digital infrastructure and adding considerable thrust to India’s digital foray. 

Consequently, the Cyber Security market is rapidly changing, though the pace is not fast enough, to counter the constantly increasing threats.  We can categorize the Indian cyber security market in three buckets:

The First bucket is where organizations are opening up to deploy 24x7 monitoring services either due to compliance needs or to put basic lights on services to monitor their perimeter security.

The Second bucket is those who are trying to improve their security posture by investing in more technologies and point solutions to protect them from persistent and sophisticated threats

The Third bucket is where organizations, especially in breach prone sectors, are going for next-gen solutions and services like MDR to protect them from unknown and sophisticated attacks and also enhance their security response to incidents. 

DT: What are the challenges SMEs are facing currently? How your solutions help them in defending against such challenges?

Mr. Sunil: Let’s answer this by asking a simple question. If you get to choose between cracking a new lock that will take 1 hour to break and cracking 20 locks that will take 1 minute each, and both give you an equal reward, which one will you choose? Similarly, cyberattackers spend months in reconnaissance and preparation to create new TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) for an attack on a well-fortified enterprise. Whereas, they can use their existing TTPs to attack several SMEs at once. This can also be understood by a relevant figure. UK, a well-digitized nation, has about 5.4 million SMEs in total. Out of these, more than 875,000 have been attacked during the last year[AV1] . So, the challenge over here is that SMEs, globally and in India, need to address cybersecurity concerns that big businesses face, but typically with lower economic and technological resources. 

To help SMEs achieve enterprise grade defence, Paladion extends the most avant-garde technologies, including Artificial Intelligence and Big Data to small businesses through its cloud-based MDR (Managed Detection and Response) solution – PaladionOnDemand. This includes addressing vulnerabilities through threat anticipation, threat hunting, security monitoring, breach management, and incident response through immediate orchestration of all four phases, i.e. containment, recovery, mitigation, and improvement. All of this happens at a more rapid pace; threat validation, for instance, happens in minutes through our MDR solutions rather than hours in traditional security services. These are some of the advantages that our cloud-based MDR solution provides SMEs. PaladionOnDemand also offers professional managed security services apart from MDR.  

DT: Briefly share your expansion & investment plans. What are your strategies to boost company’s business especially in India with all such investment? 

Mr. Sunil: Our focus from the past few years has been to build an AI platform that can advance our cyber defense capabilities. We have reached this goal, and have successfully deployed AI Driven MDR services at several leading enterprises globally. Our platform currently brings together 4 different security analytics in one seamless window, which helps our MDR team discover threats faster, analyze incidents swiftly, and respond five times faster than a traditional MSSP. We continue to invest in the platform and in also building a top-notch team of Threat Hunters, Malware Engineers, Incident Responders, Data Scientists, Ethical Hackers, and more.  

Our GSOC at Bangalore and our regional SOC at Mumbai are already AI driven SOCs. We have also invested in setting up a local AI based SOC in UAE, which will deliver MDR services to that region.  We are also investing in increasing our partner network in existing regions and in new regions like Africa, South Asia, etc.

DT: What are the key factors which help you grow in this market? 

Mr. Sunil: Paladion services over 700 customers globally and we have been in the cyber security business for over 17 years. Two factors helming our growth now are top notch MDR teams and a leading-edge platform that brings AI, Analytics and Automation to hunt and respond to threats.  We are early to the market with our AI based MDR services, and have over 30 plus clients already for the service -with many more to go live in the next couple of months Independent analyst recognitions and awards have further strengthened our position as a leader in the MDR space.   

DT: How do you motivate your partners to boost your market presence across India? 

Mr. Sunil: Partners play a very important role in enhancing our market reach.  We have a fairly good ecosystem, but we are investing in building a much bigger and stronger partner channel to boost our business.  There are partners who help us as resellers, services partners, or OEM partners to increase our market presence.  

DT: How do you take care of the service support?

Mr. Sunil: We manage service support from our different regional and global security operation centers.  For some engagements, we also have an expert team on site to help address and respond to service support quickly.  It is important for our customers to have access to experts and our platform to analyze incidents internally and verify our reports, so our incident analysts and responders are available round-the-clock to respond to customers on mail or phone. Our MDR service enables automated incident response for several threats, which is reported to customers in real-time. In some cases where customers request that we involve them for remediating threats, our incident responders collaborate with their in-house teams to respond to threats or attacks. We also offer a breach management retainer that provides on-site access to experts within an agreed period of time, while the incident is being contained remotely. 

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