The pandemic has played a major role in creating new challenges for organizations as far as cybersecurity is concerned. In addition to that, the increasing digital transformation wave has significantly added the risk to attract more cyberattacks.
Adding his views on changing cybersecurity scenario in the country, Dr. Sanjay Katkar, Joint MD & CTO, Quick Heal Technologies Ltd said, “The past two years' hybrid and remote work culture have opened a pandora’s box of cyber threats. Since people are using their personal devices to access enterprise networks or working on company laptops with home Wi-Fi, it has created more opportunities for the threat actors to target organizations. Naturally, firms across India have increased their investment in security upgrades, including endpoint and cloud security. This has resulted in 2X growth of this industry during the pandemic. As per a DSCI report, revenues from cybersecurity products and services have grown from $5.04bn in 2019 to $9.85bn in 2021.
“The surging demand has inspired the cybersecurity sector to adopt a platform-based approach to offer holistic solutions and simplify security integration and deployment. As a result, around 78% of the services companies and 76% of the product companies have started offering platform-based services and products, wherein 74% have leveraged AI/ML to enhance their product portfolio. We also saw an upsurge in demand and acceptance of EDR and XDR products - another new trend that will likely stay relevant in the years to come,” added by Sanjay Katkar.
Growing Opportunities for Security Solution Providers
With the rise in cyberattacks, the demand for next-gen security solutions has also increased. Organizations are aggressively working towards boosting their security infrastructure to stop and avoid any kind of security breach. Commenting on the scenario, Sanjay Katkar said, “While the evolving work culture has enabled threat actors to deploy new attacks, it also bestowed security solution providers and partners with opportunities to grow. Currently, skilled cybersecurity professionals are high in demand and will remain so in the future as well. India has also emerged as a partner of choice for providing cybersecurity services and products worldwide, with more and more startups expanding their operations globally. In fact, the Indian cybersecurity product and services industry has been demonstrating tremendous growth while fostering a partnership mindset since the pandemic. The collaboration between ecosystem stakeholders such as academia, government, services majors, and startups creates a conducive environment for all security providers and partners.”
Significance of Zero-trust Security Model
The Zero trust model is rapidly gaining adoption by large number of organizations. Briefing about how this model is effective to succeed in challenging conditions, Sanjay Katkar commented, “Zero Trust provides a "never trust, always verify" security model, where every connection attempt from every user and device is checked on several dimensions before that connection is allowed to access sensitive enterprise applications and services. Further, the "default deny" model of Zero Trust ensures that users and devices that explicitly match an "allow policy" are the only ones who can access these sensitive corporate applications and services. Therefore, the Zero Trust security model represents a paradigm shift from the traditional VPN security archetype of "authorize once, always trust."
He further added, “For organizations in a largely WFH or remote-first world, Zero Trust is a logical step-up in their cybersecurity architecture to prevent unauthorized access to corporate resources from unknown and unmanaged devices. By vastly reducing the threat's attack surface and lateral movement , Zero Trust significantly improves an organization's cybersecurity posture and protects it from the evolving threat landscape.”
