The success of Digital India relies on cybersecurity across all consumer segments. The Indian cybersecurity market has grown multifold as digital transformation is on the card for every size of companies. Security players have to play a very crucial role in developing innovative and effective cybersecurity solutions. Whereas the distribution house reaches customers to help them in acquiring the right solutions as per their requirement. TechnoBind, a well-known distribution partner in India, is providing the right set of cybersecurity solutions to organizations in order to help them prevent any security threats. The strong partner network across India is helping TechnoBind in reaching out to a large customer base. Prashanth G J, CEO at TechnoBind shared his views on India’s cybersecurity market and his channel plans in a recent interaction with Rajeev Ranjan, Editor & Publisher, Digital Terminal. Read below the excerpts.
Rajeev: How do you see the role of the cybersecurity market in India while we all are moving ahead in the digital transformation journey?
Prashanth: Digitization, automation, AI, cloud, social media, blockchain, IoT, and other such disruptive technologies are progressing at an enormous pace, totally exposing the data, access and other critical resources. New technologies have made life simpler but it has also brought a higher exposure to cybercrime highlighting why Cybersecurity is crucially important. The market is rapidly increasing digitization under the digital India program and thus, cybersecurity is gaining more attention than ever, not just in the news but also among industry leaders, policymakers, and the public.
According to a joint study by PwC India and DSCI, the cybersecurity market in India will grow from $1.97 billion in 2019 to $3.05 billion by 2022, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.3%. The cybersecurity market in India will be defined by the top three sectors including the banking and financial services industry (BFSI), information technology (IT) and information technology-enabled services (ITeS), and the government.
Rajeev: How the COVID-19 has affected your business currently? What measures you have taken to keep on working and engaging with your partners & customers during a current lockdown?
Prashanth: We are as affected by anybody due to COVID-19. Business has been affected but not as much as we initially thought at the start of April – thanks to some of the technologies in our portfolio which has now been found to more relevant than ever.
We have been working – in fact probably more than in the normal times thanks to the travel and traffic issues cut down. We are using collaboration tools very effectively for not only our internal discussions but also for engaging with our customers and partners. We have adopted the Go To Meeting platform completely in this lockdown and I believe our effectiveness has gone up significantly. Which is why I want to believe across industries this remote working culture can become the new norm.
The safety of our employees and customers is the logical requirement of our organization during any crisis, particularly when the whole country is fighting the pandemic like the COVID-19 outbreak. We have been fully functional working from home, to ensure the full customers' satisfaction so that they are assured of full support today and in the days to come. Our entire team has been very supportive in addressing the issues coming in from our customers. Most of the support OU issues are being handled by the technical team. We have been providing 24×7 support to our customers and we continue to do so even today. Our online telephones are open, technical engineers are working with their set of customers and resolve the issue. Since we are in this business for years delivering mission-critical solutions across industries, this makes our framework so strong enough to handle any operational issue virtually.
Rajeev: What opportunities do you see for the Indian cybersecurity market as post COVID-19 will see a drastic surge in security solutions among all sizes of businesses?
Prashanth: The pandemic situation COVID-19 outbreak has made remote working a necessity overnight. It has changed the habits and a work routine of millions and on the other hand, cybersecurity is being seen as a core technology to keep companies secure as they go online and virtual. As the pandemic settles, companies are going to accelerate digitization. Even the traditional sectors like education, hospitals will go digital. As India goes online; India will gear up to become a hub for cybersecurity.
In today’s world where technology is at the pace, what I believe is each industry regulatory body should have a robust cybersecurity framework. It is only possible to continue business in such a situation once the companies truly adopt these practices. As their support requirements will come down and they can do business whatever may be the situation.
Rajeev: How do you see your ongoing partnership with ESET in India? How are you helping ESET in reaching to a large customer base across all verticals?
Prashanth: Our ESET relationship is a year old now and we already seeing returns on our investment in terms of efforts on the field. We have focused on expanding the channel spread for ESET at the same time not take our eyes off the depth we are trying to build with our core focused partners. The efforts of which was very visible when we had our biggest ever quarter for ESET in Q4. We have a large team comprising of field channel guys and pre-sales guys – but differentiates our approach is that of our Tele-Partnering team which is helping us in building the spread.
Rajeev: What will be your core strategy to support your partners to overcome the challenges they are facing during COVID-19?
Prashanth: While everyone across the world continues to navigate the uncertainty of COVID-19, TechnoBind is committed to supporting its customers' business throughout this pandemic and to provide continuity of service at all times. We are committed to providing superior support for every product, solution, and service we take to the market. We understand that in difficult times and crisis situations like the current COVID 19, customer needs more support from us than usual. So, we are going above and beyond our deliverables agreed in SLAs to ensure our customer’s businesses are running at its most optimal level. We are proactively reaching out to our customers and suggesting changes in their current solutions at a place to handle the current challenges and also making sure the solutions are meeting their requirements with minimal manual oversight.
Rajeev: How do you see the growing trend of ‘Work from Home’ culture in India? What are the solutions you are offering to make the home networks more secure?
Prashanth: India is not geared up for an extended and widespread WFH scenario. We have seen instances where people do not even have a laptop to work from home since they use a workstation at the office. The companies may have the proper infrastructure to support remote access from anywhere but general WIFI or phone networks at remote locations are not always up and running to support continuity in work is yet another challenge that has a long way to go for a WFH to become the new normal. But what I believe is that this 50-days lockdown would have served as a forced pilot for most organizations to understand which part of their workforce can actually work from home in an effective manner. We offer the following solutions to secure scenarios where employees are working from home. We have solutions which enable Secured Remote Access for employees who are looking at logging into their corporate networks – this is the key. We also have solutions which help companies deploy a multi factor authentication solution for their employees to ensure a secure access to their data with single sign on capabilities. And finally backup of data on end point devices and cloud apps is also something which is of high interest with clients today and we have been the leaders in that space in India and now these solutions are more relevant than ever.
