With changing threat trends, organizations of any size are at great risk. Lack of awareness and availability of the right solutions are two major challenges for such companies. The security solution providers are working in the right direction nowadays to boost awareness among such consumers. We see immense opportunities in this market for security players currently and even in days to come. RSA Security, one of the well-known brands, has also chalked out its plan for the Indian market to tap the existing opportunities in this domain. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor & Publisher of Digital Terminal spoke to Rajnish Gupta, Regional Director – India & SAARC, RSA Security to know more about the company plans.
Rajeev: How do you see the current threat scenario in Indian security market?
Rajnish: One factor to consider during times of disruption is by being resilient and having a business continuity plan. Disruptions from natural disasters and outbreaks of illness to cyberattacks, affects businesses, individuals, communities, countries and the government. The present environment is lending itself to new risks brought about by a remote workforce accessing critical and sensitive systems and applications to work efficiently. Organizations across the globe are implementing remote work options extensively or for the first time, or extending it to more workers, and looking for ways to secure their infrastructure access.
Some of the key pointers to consider are:
One of our key products – RSA Archer® Suite offers integrated risk management solutions which can help customers identify, assess and reduce impact of the additional risks specific to them so that they are better prepared for the next disruptive event.
Fueled by technological innovation and digital transformation, our world is evolving and changing more quickly than ever. In 2019, with more than four billion records breached, we learnt that regardless of size or sector, every organization is a target of a possible cyberattack.
Rajeev: How do you see the digital transformation journey so far for the Indian companies?
Rajnish: India is in a phase of rapid digital transformation and is moving towards a digital society, whether it is payments, record-keeping or personal identification data, the scale of this transformation is huge in the public sector which is also driving the corporations to follow suite. We see a lot of momentum with Fintech companies, which is the fastest growing segment globally and is making an impact in the Indian market too.
According to Gartner, there is 12% growth in the India market and we are growing way ahead of that market. RSA Security has a very strong focus on the academic alliances, in terms of skill building. From a cybersecurity standpoint, the report mentions that there is a shortage of 3 million skilled personnel worldwide and India has a very strong talent pool to fulfil this shortage. Cybersecurity is one such area which we need to look into and that should be the focus to see how we can bridge the gap of skill shortage versus talent pool availability.
With the digital transformation wave – the way we do our business, how we interact with our customers and suppliers has changed. With cyber-attacks increasing, along with other factors like the mobile workforce, regulatory issues and data privacy are elevating the level of threats. To keep this in check, companies must keep pace with risk and security strategies that combine awareness, collaboration, investment and innovation.
Rajeev: What are the key security solutions from RSA to secure digital assets of organizations?
Rajnish: RSA delivers business-driven security solutions that provide a unified approach to managing digital risk that hinges on integrated visibility, automated insights and coordinated actions. RSA products hold leadership positions in Gartner Magic Quadrants and protect over 50 million identities and over a billion consumers worldwide. With over 700 dedicated security practitioners and a global ecosystem of over 400 partners, RSA delivers unified capabilities in the four essential areas of business-driven security: evolved SIEM & threat defense, identity and access assurance, integrated risk management, and fraud prevention, as well as services for risk and cyber security.
The RSA portfolio includes:
Rajeev: Please brief about your channel strength across all Indian market. How do you assure that your partners are growing well and making decent profitability in selling your security solutions?
Rajnish: RSA Security focuses on partners, who can help in coverage and bring in Net New Logos. By having focused partners and Distributors, we can help the channel community with better enablement, marketing budgets and interaction with the sales resources. We are looking at how the white space can be better leveraged, through our partner ecosystem.
It is extremely important to have the channels engaged, it is impossible for a company to cover all accounts and market segments with its own sales force. Besides, the channels are the ones who bid for large projects where the RSA products maybe a part of the bigger bid. Not engaging through the channels would mean that a large part of opportunities are being missed out. A typical example is a Smart City project or projects with a large government department etc.
We want to skill our focus on the key partners with more than one product family. The RSA product family is designed to seamlessly interlock and provide value to our customers. We would like our partners to be trained to architect and deploy the RSA NetWitness Suite, RSA Archer Suite, RSA SecurID Access, RSA Fraud and Risk Intelligence solutions. There are various levels of skills development that are provided through the On-Demand online portal, and instructor led training and certifications. We also have the shadowing experience, where a partner gets to learn a real time deployment by shadowing the RSA team.
We continually have partner enablement workshops and skills trainings for both sales and pre-sales for all our focus partners. There are various levels and types of skill training programs – online, instructor led, certifications etc. Training and upgrading partner skill sets in an ongoing process and we do this programmatically. This is working well for RSA and we will continue with it throughout the year.
Rajeev: What according to you is the major challenge for all players in security domain? Please share your strategy to counter this challenge.
Rajnish: Traditionally, cyber security was seen as the way to protect everything. The businesses have now started to realize that, protecting everything is not possible, which leads to the question of 'what is important'. This is where the risk management solutions help. We at RSA Security believe in a risk-based approach and educate our customers and partners about digital risk management keeping in mind the digital transformation trends. A lot of information is produced by an increase in the usage of cloud services, internet and mobile data, leading to risks. RSA is helping our customers in understanding this difference from the traditional cybersecurity approach.
RSA Security is the standalone oldest cybersecurity company and we are at the intersection of the world with digital transformation. Cybersecurity conversations need to be risk-based– which information is important, what needs to be safeguarded and what happens if an organization does not assess the risks to brand reputation, financials, customer loyalty. RSA recommends breaking down of business and security silos to take control of risks stemming from digital transformations. The security incidents must have a business context to manage risks effectively.