The disruption instigated by the pandemic offered more opportunity for cybercriminals to orchestrate cyberattacks and critical breaches on corporate outfits, individuals and government bodies. The overnight transition towards remote operations and the rapid cloud adoption proved to be a hefty bargain for many companies as their system security and employees were unprotected and exposed to cybercriminals.
Elaborating about the changing cybersecurity scenario, Parag Khurana, Country Manager, Barracuda Networks India said, “Now, as businesses are adapting to the new normal, organisations across India and the world are focusing on boosting their cybersecurity defenses against the growing cyber threats that are taking advantage of the new reality. As per a Barracuda report, 79% of Indian IT decision-makers surveyed said their organisation has been the victim of at least one ransomware attack in 2021. Organisations have begun to understand that to maintain business continuity, they must innovate and enhance their existing cybersecurity frameworks and deploy the latest security toolkits and techniques. This will help them forge a robust and resilient architecture against the ever-evolving threat matrix.”
Increasing Investments Driving Opportunities
“With a significant rise in investments made by Indian and international companies to bolster the overarching cybersecurity capabilities of the nation, India’s cybersecurity industry has almost doubled in size during the pandemic, with revenues from cybersecurity products and services growing from $5.04bn in 2019 to $9.85bn in 2021. This impressive growth was catalysed by fast-paced digitalisation, increased regulatory attention on data and privacy, increased corporate awareness around cyber threats, and a slew of other factors,” Parag said. “Meanwhile, with the massive shift to a remote workforce amid the pandemic, there is a significant growth of workloads into the public cloud. Cybercriminals are exploiting new threat vectors, such as the disappearance of traditional network perimeter and increasing number of distracted remote employees, to penetrate business’ corporate data. Protecting digital assets and data stored within cloud and web applications remains the key focus for organisations, as well as security providers and partners,” added by him.
“As the leading provider of cloud-first security solutions, Barracuda expands our cloud-native security capabilities to address customers’ needs in protecting their email, application, network and data. For example, we introduced Barracuda SASE platform that brings together Secure SD-WAN, Firewall-as-a-Service, Zero Trust Network Access and offers immense value to businesses with cloud-first priorities to move network infrastructure, routing, security, and remote access to the public cloud. In addition, we’re seeing the growth of Microsoft 365 data as businesses accelerate cloud adoption amid the pandemic. In addressing the increasing demand for Microsoft Office 365 data protection, Barracuda introduced the re-architected Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup to deliver a fast search and restore experience for Microsoft 365 data. We also added a new data center in India to help local customers meet the strict data protection requirements,” he said.
Significance of Zero Trust Security Model
Zero trust is a tactical approach to cybersecurity. Zero Trust means that every person and every device are not trusted, whether they are inside or outside of the company network perimeter. Briefing about the increasing adoption of Zero Trust security model, he said, “As organisations are increasingly shifting to remote workforce and company data is in the cloud, the concept of the network is extended outside of the office perimeter using VPNs. Unfortunately, today’s businesses cannot rely on legacy VPN products to protect their devices and data. They can be unreliable and complex to configure, and setup and their technology is based on old assumptions fitting the old, office-only work model. Researchers found that VPNs quite often do not deliver on their security promises. Present-day organisations need a full-stack security blueprint to resolve the contemporary technological complications, and none better than zero-trust security to address this prime requirement.”
“The Zero Trust model shifts the company network perimeter and moves it to every device and user within a company trying to access information. By only allowing the right person, with the right device, and with the right permissions to access company data or apps, it protects the access to company data which is critical for distributed enterprises. It increases the chances that if an asset is compromised, it won’t affect the entire company,” concluded by him.
