The cyber security landscape in India has evolved quite rapidly as the organizations have embraced digital transformation on a larger scale. At the same the number of cyber-attacks has also increased. To prevent any kind of incidents, organizations are deploying effective security solutions into their IT infrastructure to protect any cyber threats. The latest technologies are playing a crucial role in the advancement of security solutions to boost cybersecurity approach. SonicWall is one of the fastest growing cybersecurity solution providers in India with wide range of security solutions. To know more about the rising cyber incidents and way to eliminate any cyber risk, Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently interacted with Debasish Mukherjee, Vice President, Regional Sales APAC, SonicWall Inc. Mr. Debasish shared his views on the current market, their offerings, growth plans and much more. Read below the excerpts:
Rajeev: How do you see India as a Cybersecurity market? What sort of growth opportunities do you see here amidst alarming surge in the number of Cyber incidents?
Debasish: According to a report, the Indian cybersecurity services and product industry had a combined revenue of $9.85 billion in 2021 and grew at a CAGR of 40% in the last two years. The services industry grew from $4.3 Billion in 2019 to $8.48 Billion in 2021 at a CAGR of 40.33%. The product industry grew from $740 Million in 2019 to reach $1.37 Billion in 2021 at a CAGR of 36.49%
Organisations incur significant losses in terms of revenues, brand reputation, unplanned workforce reduction, and business disruptions due to data breaches. Thereby, these companies end up spending a considerable amount of money to recover from these losses and mitigate the risks evolving from data breaches. According to a report published by IBM in 2021, the average cost of data breaches for an organization amounted to USD 4.87 million, an increase of 10% over 2020. Today, organizations are deploying advanced cyber security solutions to detect cyber threats and provide a response at a faster pace in order to help them cut down data breach costs.
Cyber security companies today need to evolve and engage in developing security solutions with AI that help organizations automate their IT security. Such solutions enable automated threat detection and remediation, allowing IT professionals to reduce the efforts and time required to track malicious activities, techniques, and tactics. These solutions will offer real-time monitoring and identification of new threats while also responding autonomously.
Also cloud migration has moved at a rapid pace, especially during this pandemic era enabling the market growth. Many companies have been forced to adopt more flexible infrastructure models in the shortest possible timelines. Increased use of cloud and mobile computing, IoT devices, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, etc. has added new levels of risk, complexity, and costs to securing an organization’s data and intellectual property.
Rajeev: How was the year 2021 for SonicWall in terms of revenue/market share? What were the major highlights for you in 2021?
Debasish: For SonicWall, 2021 was the best ever year with record levels of sales and profitability. The company witnessed substantial increase in demand for its products and solutions including its Generation 7 next-generation firewalls.
Despite a difficult economic climate, the company posted strong financial results strengthening its pipeline growth, including a 33% increase in new customer growth and generating a 45% increase in new customer sales. Additionally, SonicWall has seen incredible growth in cloud-delivered products and services, which are up 36% year-over-year. Plus, new Generation 7 products have represented 90% of sales over the past year.
Other business achievements:
Rajeev: How are you planning to take this growth momentum further high in the new financial year?
Debasish: SonicWall will continue to expand its business across regions through its state of the art next gen cyber security solutions and the wide network of partners who are a crucial part of the organisation.
To achieve this, SonicWall recently introduced three new high-performance firewall models — NSa 5700, NSsp 10700 and NSsp 11700 that were designed to protect the largest and most complex enterprises, government agencies and MSSPs from advanced cyberattacks, including ransomware and never-before-seen malware, without sacrificing network performance.
Our focus would be to continue developing and further enhancing our solutions for the future. We believe IOT would be very relevant specially with the latest 5G connectivity. Securing more and more devices interconnected will be the challenge not just for businesses but also for individuals in their daily lives.
Rajeev: Please tell about your offerings for the Indian customers. Which major verticals are you focusing on currently to push your growth?
Debasish: SonicWall continues to be on top of the game providing integrated cyber security solutions to customers to make their businesses continue safely and seamlessly. Our offerings range comprises Next Gen Firewalls that are designed for large, distributed enterprises, data centers and MSSPs, SonicWave Series that offer Security and performance for the next wave of wireless devices, managed through the cloud or firewall.
SonicWall’s Capture Security appliance (CSa) are deployed On-premise enabling file testing and malware prevention on the go.
Our Cloud Edge Secure Access is a powerful SaaS application that delivers simple network-as-a-service for site-to site and hybrid cloud connectivity to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. In the process, it combines Zero-Trust and Least-Privilege security approaches into one integrated offering.
SonicWall’s Next-Gen Firewall Subscription Services is a one of its kind offering that includes basic but top of the line security services needed to ensure that a network is protected from threats in a cost-effective manner.
We have been very successful in bridging cybersecurity gaps for enterprises, governments, and SMBs worldwide by providing real-time visibility and enabling breakthrough economics.
Our focus would continue to partner with larger enterprises while also working with SMBs in education and government sector.
Rajeev: Indian organizations still hold back when it comes to invest in cybersecurity so what are the key cybersecurity recommendations SonicWall would make to the Indian CIOs/CISOs?
Debasish: The pandemic has changed the way businesses work and the way IT secures them. Now, more than ever, organizations will have to deploy solutions to manage and secure all endpoints. As ransomware and credential theft become increasingly more pervasive, endpoints have become the battleground of today’s threat landscape.
Cloud adoption has accelerated drastically in today’s times, which means a major rise in demand and need for cloud-ready security solutions. These security solutions must meet the same levels of agility, flexibility, and scale to meet the adoption needs, which also requires a great deal of automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
This year will be more focus on Remote mobility, focus on Email Security and Advance End point Security and focus will be on visibility and automated threat hunting and remediation technologies.
Rajeev: How do you reach to customers across India? What is your current channel network strength? Do you have any channel program currently for Indian market?
Debasish: As a 100% partner-oriented company, we believe that they are the extension of our company, the obvious go-to market route for us. Therefore, we lay great emphasis on processes and programs, making them well structured, highly rewarding, and educating for our partners. No doubt, these programs need to be dynamic and evolving to respond to changing market needs as well as meet channel aspirations.
Today we are a strong team of over 17000 partners in various regions across the globe of which 2500 partners are based in India. Our success is based on the philosophy of knowledge building and knowledge sharing and such programs bring our channel partner community closer to the company so we can learn and grow together.
Created and produced exclusively for SonicWall partners, Boundless is the company’s global virtual partner experience annual event that provides unparalleled content, insight and expert analysis to help partners succeed. The attendance for the current 2022 event was up 16% to the previous years, with over 47,000 live reactions throughout the content.
For the above reasons, SonicWall has been repeatedly awarded with a prestigious 5-star rating in the Partner Program Guide by CRN, a brand of The Channel Company.
