Ramsunder Papineni, Regional Director – India and SAARC, FireEye, explains how the company’s signature-less technology prepares organizations to counter next-generation of security threats in an interview with Heena Jhingan. Excerpts
In value terms, how big do you think is security an opportunity in India and how do you plan to tap it?
As per IDC, the total security market is about $250 mn and is growing at 20% CAGR. FireEye solutions are deployed in over 40 countries and in more than 25% of the Fortune 100. We now plan to expand to the India market. Our solutions are already available in the market. We are undertaking several PoCs and FireEye is being evaluated by a number of customers in India. We observe that Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) is a growing challenge for organizations across verticals and we are actively working with customers to curb these threats. We also have a good channel partner and distribution network in India, which we will be further expanding. We are working with large system integrators as well. Apart from major tier-1 partners, we also work with auditing companies such as Deloitte and PwC.
You have done well in other markets by focusing on the government business. Is your approach in the India market likely to be focused on specific verticals?
Our products and solutions have helped address the needs of customers across all verticals, like government, telcos, BFSI, ITeS and critical infrastructure segments like oil, gas, power and manufacturing, to name a few.
We essentially are a company focused on advanced persistent threats (APT), which are serious concerns for most enterprises and security vendors. So we do not replace conventional security solutions; instead, we complement them. We also have collaborations with security vendors such as McAfee, RSA, Arcsight, and Blue Coat.
FireEye solutions have helped customers to protect against brand damage, loss of data, loss of intellectual property and hence save dollars and reputation. Cyber security threats are a growing concern of governments across the world. We are also focused on the government in India and will work proactively to help protect government organizations here with our solutions. At present, we have been approaching the government vertical directly as it is a critical segment for us. We have certain reference PoCs to demonstrate to the nodal government agencies. To begin with, we are actively identifying government projects where our solutions can be deployed
The Indian security market is already very competitive. How do you think is your approach different?
Traditionally, players like Symantec and McAfee have all been using signature-matching to secure networks. Those were the times when the hackers’ agenda was to bring the victims’ network down. However, in times of cyber wars and corporate espionage, the objective of the attackers is to intrude into the victims’ network to get confidential data. It is here where FireEye Technology is unique. We do not rely on just signatures and monitor every traffic. We put the box on the network behind the firewall and for this reason we are also referred to as the last leg of defense. We have a multi-vector virtualization engine (MVEX) that detects and blocks attacks across all vectors—web, email, file and mobile. We prepare signatures on the fly without depending on cloud. We essentially replicate the organization’s infrastructure on the virtual machine, so in an event of attack, while the hackers believe they have hit the system it is only the virtual machine that gets effected. Our proprietary virtualized engine further enhances the security of our solutions deployed in an organization.
Since the purpose of attacks these days is to get information, we not only protect the system from being exposed, we also block the call back tunnel, the path that leads to source of the attack. This is the path through which the stolen information travels.
The FireEye Dynamic Threat Intelligence (DTI) cloud interconnects FireEye appliances deployed within customer networks, technology partner networks, and service providers around the world. This worldwide cloud efficiently shares auto-generated malware security intelligence, such as callback channels, as well as new threat findings from the FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab. Besides this, by integrating with other security solutions, we provide an intelligent security platform for organizations.
Where do you see India in terms of its vulnerability to targeted hacking?
India is a developing economy and is sitting on a repository of intellectual property and data which are vulnerable to coordinated persistent threat actors. We are trying to address this market with our solutions that can best help in protecting these assets against the next-generation threats. Even some of the industry analysts like Gartner acknowledge that traditional solutions built on signatures are not well equipped for next generation threats like APTs. India is an important market and we plan to invest $40 to 5$0 mn for R&D in India over the next five years.
