The cybersecurity landscape in India is constantly evolving due to various factors such as technological advancements, increasing reliance on digital infrastructure, and the evolving tactics of cybercriminals. To keep pace with the evolving threat landscape, organizations are adapting to emerging technologies and best practices. Splunk is one of the leading market players helping organizations to prevent their digital infrastructure. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently interacted with Jyoti Prakash, Regional Sales Director, India & SAARC Countries, Splunk. He talked about various burning issues right from the cyber incidents and trends, challenges, and the company's approach to develop cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions. Here is the excerpt:
Rajeev: How have cyber incidents evolved over the past few years in India, and what trends are you seeing?
Jyoti Prakash: With the rapid digitisation, cyber incidents in India have evolved in frequency, sophistication, and impact, posing significant challenges to individuals, businesses, and the overall cybersecurity landscape in India. In fact, according to Splunk’s latest State of Security 2023 report, 59% respondents in India more often report having been breached in the last two years. As cybersecurity risks continue to evolve, some of the key trends that we anticipate in the Indian cybersecurity landscape in 2023 are:
Cybercrime-as-a-Service economy will accelerate the volume and effectiveness of cyberattacks and companies should expect even more attacks given the remote & hybrid work environment.
Misinformation attacks against businesses will increase considerably as AI technology continues to improve. Deep fakes and other methods that distort reality should be taken into consideration by security leaders in order to avoid reputational and financial losses.
Supply chain disruptions will continue with under-funded and under-sourced open source technologies being a significant vulnerability. Open Source is widely used but has yet to resolve compliance standards. This puts organisations' supply chain system to risk.
Blockchain security concerns will increase and cyberspace breaches in the blockchain industry will probably have some of the biggest financial effects.
Machine Learning (ML) offers greater security but can also act as another vector of attack and cannot be left unsupervised. While ML algorithms recognise data threats and alert possible cyber breach, it will be important to understand these model functions and keep a close watch over them.
To maintain a competitive edge in 2023, business leaders must embrace analytics-based security solutions and unified platforms that provide comprehensive visibility into their digital systems. This approach ensures cyber resilience and safeguards organisations against the growing threat of highly sophisticated and constantly evolving attacks, thus future-proofing their operations.
Rajeev: What are the key cybersecurity challenges Indian organisations are facing today, and how do you address them?
Jyoti Prakash: As modern enterprises witness a growing number of interconnected devices and a massive influx of sensitive and confidential data, the significance of having a strong cybersecurity framework is increasingly gaining importance. In Splunk’s latest report, we learned that some of the critical challenges faced by Indian organisations in the current scenario are:
Increase in Ransomware attacks - 75% of the organisations reported that they continue to grapple with ransomware attacks.
Security breach in cloud environment - With 50% of respondents saying that the majority of their SOC (Security Operations Centre) team’s time is spent addressing issues in the public cloud, while just 13% spend most of their time addressing on-premises issues.
Vulnerabilities in the supply chain - Software supply chain attacks are top-of mind in the post-SolarWinds era. 95% of organisations have increased their focus on third-party risk assessment activity, up from an already noteworthy 90% from 2022.
In today’s complex world, cyber security challenges are only going to become intense. To overcome this, organisations can look to implement advanced analytics solutions for anomaly detection, leverage on SIEM (Security Information and event management) solutions for accuracy and rely on SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) to efficiently observe, understand, decide, and respond to security incidents.
Rajeev: What role does innovation play in your company's approach to develop cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions?
Jyoti Prakash: Innovation stands as one of Splunk's core values. By embracing innovation, Splunk’s unified security and observability solutions powered by the Splunk platform is a key differentiator to enabling enterprise resilience.
For example, from a product perspective, we recently introduced Mission Control, our unified security operations solution that combines security analytics (Splunk Enterprise Security), orchestration and automation (Splunk SOAR), and threat intelligence to streamline and fortify cybersecurity practices. This integration offers a unified and simplified security operations experience that helps IT teams reduce complexity and incorporate cyber resilience.
Splunk also has a SURGE (Security Research, Guidance, and Education) team, made up of security experts who focus on security trends and innovations and providing customers with in-depth analysis of the latest cybersecurity findings in the form of research, rapid response guides, and webinars. This unique team enables organisations to proactively strengthen their security posture, implement best practices, and leverage the full capabilities of Splunk's security solutions.
With the recent announcement of our new CTO, Min Wang, joining Splunk to spearhead our technology innovation and product roadmap, we are excited to continue to deliver cutting-edge solutions to our customers.
Rajeev: What differentiates Splunk from other cybersecurity companies in the market?
Jyoti Prakash: As organisations become increasingly digital, they are only as resilient as their digital systems. Splunk's primary focus revolves around enhancing enterprise resilience and equipping them to withstand the unprecedented challenges in the future. We do that by helping them mature their security and observability capabilities so their mission-critical systems stay secure and reliable. Splunk empowers organisations with visibility into all of their digital systems, surfacing key risks and detecting potential issues and responding to them before they become major incidents.
Splunk differentiates itself by offering SecOps, ITOps and Engineering teams a shared view of data. A shared perspective helps to remove silos and facilitates seamless collaboration across teams, thereby mitigating security, infrastructure, and application concerns. This enables organisations to adapt to unforeseen challenges and expedite digital transformation efforts.
With Splunk’s unified platform, organisations are able to build a data-centric digital foundation, go modular thanks to a unified data lake and be able to customise solutions around security, IT and observability. This enables organisations to realise business value faster, and at scale.
Rajeev: Please tell us about your most effective cybersecurity solutions. How do you ensure the optimum availability of these solutions across India?
Jyoti Prakash: Splunk’s security and observability solutions provide comprehensive visibility across the hybrid and edge technology landscape, as well as powerful tools for investigation and response, at scale. The Splunk Security portfolio combines SIEM, SOAR, behavioural analytics and threat intelligence which helps customers achieve integration and efficient process execution across threat detection, investigation and response necessary for a modern SOC.
Splunk is committed to providing our customers with solutions that are relevant to the market. A good example is the availability of Splunk Cloud Platform on the AWS Marketplace in India, which allows customers to gain additional security, operational and cost management insights across AWS and hybrid environments. The result is that organisations in India are able to manage costs more effectively, provision resources more freely, and scale more easily.
Splunk not only prioritises delivering an exceptional customer experience but also fosters a thriving partner ecosystem with over 2800 partners, enabling them to scale and ensure the success of their customers. We are also proud to be recognised as a leader in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) by market analysts including Forrester, Gartner and IDC. I am excited that Splunk is able to help organisations in India scale and achieve digital resilience with our industry leading solutions.
