Enterprises need edge-enabled holistic security solutions at present: Arjun Kallawar, Head – Solutions Engineering, India & South Asia, Edgio

The evergrowing technologies have given a digital makeover to businesses across industries. However, as the trend of digitalisation surges so is the need for strong and effective cybersecurity solutions. Organisations, today, not only need to deploy best-in-class security solutions but also upskill their workforce to tackle unprecedented scenarios. Addressing the subject, Arjun Kallawar, Head – Solutions Engineering for India & South Asia, Edgio, shares the solution provider’s perspective on cybersecurity in an exclusive interview with Express Computer.

Edgio provides a range of IT solutions to cater to end-to-end business needs. Please share an overview of Edgio’s business in India. Also, what gives you an edge over competitors?

Edgio is a globally scaled, edge-enabled solutions provider for businesses, looking to meet the growing demand for fast, secure, and frictionless digital experiences. Whether organisations need to build a new headless experience, optimise their property for speed, or want ongoing video and security expertise we do it all through our fully integrated platform and end-to-end edge services. 

Currently, we are servicing 4 percent of global internet traffic and clients in 38 countries around the globe. Edgio’s comprehensive security protection platform provides protection against a wide range of web threats including DDoS, bot management, Zero Day security attacks, and account takeovers. Our Applications platform also helps improve website reliability, security, and speed. 

Flexible solutions from Edgio provide an edge to customers as they integrate seamlessly with customer workflows. Key capabilities that our platform offers are holistic web and application security, increased website performance, orchestrated workflows for both application delivery and live video streaming, and global reach across an edge network.

Digital is here to stay and ‘forward’ is the only way to go. However, this digitalisation also make businesses highly vulnerable to cyber threats, ransomware attacks, phishing, and a lot more. What do you think are the loopholes and what practices organisations can adopt to manage to overcome them?

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link. The link in today’s cybersecurity ecosystem is the conventional/traditional cybersecurity approaches which rely on reactive, detect-and-respond measures and tedious manual processes as they can’t keep pace with the volume, variety, and velocity of current threats. Hence, organisations need to adopt a holistic edge-enabled security solution built on an extensive, globally distributed platform where businesses can address the latest cybersecurity threats and achieve protection across networks and applications without a single point of failure or performance bottleneck. The benefits of an edge-enabled holistic security solution are:

• Massive scale and resiliency to ensure uptime

• Intelligent rules execution for faster threat detection

• Integration with edge logic and CI/CD workflows to improve operations

• Attacks mitigated at the source to improve performance and user experience

Security solutions that provide easy integration and automation can enhance IT workflows and enable quick deployments of security updates to keep up with the evolving threat landscape.

Securing cyberspace effectively needs a collective approach and just the CIO or CISO cannot assure it. What solutions do you offer as a holistic approach to keep cyber threats at bay?

Edge platforms have become a critical component of digital infrastructure for many consumer-facing businesses. This evolution from traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) has been driven by the need for faster application performance, AI-driven personalisation, and holistic security protection. We are securing business, critical applications, and APIs through our innovative solutions that are designed to help customers accelerate detection and respond to new threats in a timely manner. Some of the holistic security solutions that we offer are:

+ Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) which speeds up response times to vulnerabilities and threats with comprehensive web application and API protection solutions, including a dual WAF mode that empowers customers to deploy and optimise security rules without impacting their traffic.

+ DDoS Protection which automatically detects and mitigates DDoS attacks on our distributed network edge before they impact your web infrastructure. Our software-defined, always-on DDoS protection is backed by a massive global network with 70x the capacity of the largest recorded attacks.

+ Advanced Bot Manager is agentless, non-intrusive, and AI and ML-powered bot management solution to accurately determine, in real-time, if an application request is from a fraudulent source and mitigate it. It relies on behavioural analysis to mitigate non-human threat actors.

+ Origin Shield which provides an intermediate caching layer reducing requests back to your origin, improves availability and helps you lower egress costs.

+ Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.2+) which encrypts information in transit to prevent data theft and other tampering.

With time, technology like smartphones and social media platforms became a handy thing for people irrespective of their education level. Do you think, at some point in time, cybersecurity can seep into people’s minds enough that they’re well aware of the threats and know their contingency plans beforehand?  

Yes, organisations are now slowly ramping up their cyber defence against these malicious factors. However, many businesses are struggling to address these issues due to a lack of expertise. It is therefore important that organisations are supported by solution providers that have prior experience, can match the scale of the business, and cover the entire range of rapidly evolving threats. Also, organisations should start implementing a zero-trust security framework which provides a holistic approach to strengthening a company’s overall security posture. It does not assume users as a trusted source and applies high levels of network security to segment users and devices.

What vision do you hold for the Indian market? How do you see Edgio’s growth trajectory in the near future?

We recently launched two new solutions Edgio Applications Platform version 7, which is empowering enterprises to drive revenue growth enhancing their web security, optimising site performance, and boosts team velocity. 

The next is Edgio’s Advanced Bot Manager which has granular policy controls and ML-based detection against evolving automated attacks. It is an integral component of our multi-layered security approach, which includes Access Control, Rate Limiting, Custom, as well as Managed Rule Sets, providing holistic protection against web security vulnerabilities.

We take great pride in our future roadmap and the momentum we have generated thus far. Along with several notable highlights, we have made numerous feature and platform upgrades that will fortify our platform and enhance our solutions further.

We have implemented our target operating model that fully integrates us into “One Edgio”. This model is flatter, more agile, and more efficient. Lastly, Edgio is on a journey to expand its presence in India and globally, with an additional expansion focus on the markets in Southeast Asia.