eScan, a known Indian security solution brand has been securing the PC since 90’s and developing solutions for Indian customers. Mr. Anil Gupta, AVP-India Sales, eScan exclusively shared his opinions with DT about security market, cyber threats and their strategies. Below are his opinions:
Q. How do you see the security market in India? What are the major challenges?
A. To put things in perspective more than 300 petabytes of data is generated per day due to social media usage. Today social media and digital media are an integral part to every business and thus the amount of data generated by businesses is soon going to cross the quintillion mark. In addition, the government initiative on smart cities and Digital India drive are also added. Along with the data growth comes to cyber threats to protect the valuable data be it business or personal front. This in the coming days going to be the driver for IT security needs. Hence IT security is going to be the corner stone of every IT infrastructure building block.
Some of the key major challenges are a robust legal system to thwart the cyber crimes, well though security policies on usage of technology by the user groups, creating preemptive fraud alert models to keep an eye on real time breaches. As our research team has witnessed in recent time, due to lack of awareness among the new age or novice users of internet, cyber crimes like phishing to ransomwares are still spreading its wings. As we embrace the digital world with banking to shopping and from travel to healthcare, the dependency on IT needs to be protected with robust security measures at every level to safe guard the users as well keep safe the humongous data by the service providers.
Q. What are your basics ideas while developing solutions for India? How do you benefit from make in India initiative?
A. As we are adopting technology today from managing the businesses to personal lives, the dependency on IT is imperative. However, it has to be kept in mind that is it business or personal life, the customer data or personal data is crucial to be kept safe from cyber criminals. That has cost organizations millions of dollar losses to organizations and individuals who are falling prey to ransomware attacks. Apart from that the growing interconnected services of infrastructures are becoming victims of C&C attacks such as APTs, DDoS, etc crippling the entire services. Hence the basic building blocks needs to be a strong security policy and implementation for all the IT services be it banking to healthcare or shopping or e-governance.
Make in India, is another initiative by Government of India to help boost the growth of manufacturing of technological products in India with technology transfer from IP holding countries. This in turn will help Indian companies to adopt and get the best of the technologies from world over and develop locally at low cost. We are proud to say that; eScan is one of India’s first MADE IN INDIA products in terms of packaged software to go global. In fact way back in 1996 we were one of the few handful companies who exported software as a packaged product. And today we are one of the fastest growing Indian security software solution providers, at par with MNCs in India. Hence it would not be wrong to say that we are the flag bearer of the Make in India plan.
Q. What is your marketing strategy to capture larger market share in security solution market?
A. eScan being a channel centric company believes in growing along with channel partners. We have today more than 5000 active channel partners selling our product and solutions in India. Among the enterprise segment we closely work with the top 10 SI partners as well as the regional and local level SI partners to provide our security solutions to provide our users real time protection. Our research team works round the clock to provide solutions for the growing cyber threats be it a ransomware or APTs.
Our marketing strategy is multipronged, which to simply say is new customer acquisitions through customer awareness and engagement and our eScan Channel Program, which is one of the best in the industry with dedicated training programs for partner sales and technical teams to providing rebates on target achievements and POC support during customer life cycle period.
As our product strategy, we have solutions available across Enterprise to Business and SOHO segments. This helps us addressing the market across the segment and capture top of the mind recall as well as be one the preferred partner for enterprises with customized solutions to provide real time protection to corporate and enterprises.
Q. What are the latest cyber threats which have affected consumers in India? What are your solutions to counter those attacks?
A. Ransomware is a bigger threat than perceived earlier, as it is now more complex in its attacks. It is becoming more sophisticated with stealth modes to penetrate the network or stand alone systems. At times, it hides through layers in endpoints or storage devices to sneak inside the larger enterprises. Threats such as APT and targeted attacks are on the rises too, BYOD users are also being included in the attack vector. This makes it all the more important for us to choose a Security solution which provides a credible solution to these emerging threats.
Escan recently launched its PBAE technology, which is one its kind world class solution against ransomware attacks. It uses proactive behavioral pattern analysis of executable applications in a sandbox environment and if found suspicious quarantines or ends the query. This is one the latest and robust solution available today against all kind of ransomwares or variants of it.
Q. How do you manage to sell your solutions across India? Please brief us about your channel strength.
A. eScan being a strong channel driven organization, and being a pure play security solutions developer has taken strides in its endeavor to provide greater opportunity for the SI partners. To strengthen its association further with eScan, gives continuous product training program and to educate partners about the giving business opportunity.
As mentioned above we have more than 5000 active channel partners across India providing our box and ESD based solutions to customers. Apart from that we have direct presence in 40 cities of and towns in India with our sales and technical teams providing support to our channel partners for sales and technical needs at ground level. Apart from a well definedeScan partner program, which takes care of partner training, certification, reward programs, rebates etc for our channel eco system for mutual growth.
Q. How do you see the market in b & c class cities? What are your plans for these markets?
A. As spoken above about our channel reach and presence in more than 40 cities, which covers even the B & C class cities and our unified channel program also helps in providing a conducive eco system for these partners in B & C class cities to grow with eScan product and solutions.
Q. How do you boost awareness among channel partners?
A. eScan partnership program is designed to provide a rewarding platform for mutually beneficial growth and joint GTM strategy. We provide complete training and pre sales support to the partners from POC to implementation as part of our eScan Partner Program. It also rewards and recognizes the partners for their valuable contributions in business growth. We also extend our support in terms of lead generation to closing the sales. The rewards program helps our partners to expand their reach and improve customer relationship while being rewarded financially. Apart from this we also provide Sales Support, Technical Support and Marketing Support in which Partners are provided with eScan marketing kit, which contains marketing tools such as product data sheets, testimonials, product comparisons, product salient features etc.
Also our national advertising and branding activities across national newspapers and on ground activities helps boosting the brand visibility and boost our sales support.
