Big Blue has traditionally been known for its expertise in analytics and cloud, besides its record of patents that the giant keeps on filing every year. However, one area of focus, which has not been traditionally well known, is the enterprise security portfolio.
For the record, IBM Security became a $2 billion business, and is the fastest growing vendor in the global security software market based on Gartner’s recent security market analysis. IBM Security has 10,000 clients in 133 countries, 7,500 researchers, developers, and subject matter experts focused on security, 3,700 security-related patents, and 36 IBM security locations across the globe. The security services division of IBM manages more than 20 billion events per day, and has more than 3,700 clients worldwide in 133 countries. IBM Security also hosts one of the world’s largest URL databases with more than 25 billion web pages and images. It collects 1,000 financial malware samples daily and leverages intelligence from 270 million endpoints.
The Indian opportunity
With most Indian enterprises adopting cloud, analytics and social technologies, IBM believes that security will be paramount for Indian enterprises. Additionally, in India, most enterprises are still grappling with the challenge of getting a complete picture of security due to the fragmented nature of security tools and systems that are focused on achieving specific goals. IBM understands that security is key for every product or service, and believes it to be a big business opportunity for the firm in India. “This is a new era of information security, as the level and sophistication of attacks has gone up significantly. With more and more Indian financial enterprises focusing on digital technologies, their vulnerability to sophisticated cyberattacks has increased,” states Diana Kelley, Executive Security Advisor, IBM.
According to RBI records, 22 million of the 589 million bank account holders use mobile banking apps and the volume of mobile banking transactions has risen from around 18,190 million INR in 2011–12 to approximately 1,018,510 million INR in 2014–15. And this number is set to rise dramatically.
The cost of data breaches have also increased significantly. For example, a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of IBM, states that the cost of data breach in India increased significantly from 3,098 INR (India Rupees) in 2014 to 3,396 INR for one compromised record. Further, the total average cost paid by a company also increased from 83.1 million INR to 88.5 million INR in 2015.
“There is a critical need for protecting digital assets, and hence, enterprise security will be of increased importance for Indian enterprises. We are witnessing this growth in India, and are one of the fastest growing security vendors. In an era where everything from banks to utilities to railway systems are getting connected, security has become vital,” says Kelley.
For information security to be successful, the industry has to rapidly research the latest security threats, aggregate actionable intelligence and collaborate with peers. Talking about how the positioning of security has changed, Kelly says, “Enterprise Security has now become a boardroom discussion. For enterprise security initiatives to be successful, enterprise security solutions have to be embedded with the processes or applications, and should not be ‘bolted’ on,” explains Kelley.
Kelley believes that the Indian government’s focus on Digital India, Smart Cities and initiatives that are centered around financial inclusion will accelerate the demand for enterprise security solutions, as security will be an integral part of every application or service.