Trend Micro is geared to meet the demand for security solutions coming from integrated digital footprint created by Digital India and Smart Cities initiatives
By Mohd Ujaley
Recently two major cyber security breaches have come to light. One, the website of the Indian Space Agency’s commercial arm, Antrix Corporation, was hacked. The hackers succeeded in defacing the home page with an article about 300 kids from Cape Town getting American Major League jerseys at cheap prices from China.
And, second, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) alleged to have lost Rs 197 crore after cyber criminals duplicated the public sector firm’s official e-mail address with minor changes and used it to convince a Saudi Arabia-based client, Aramco, to transfer payments to their account.
Both of these incidents are grim reminder to the government as well as businesses that lot need to be done when it comes to cyber security in the country. With government embarking on the creation of digital highway and building of smart cities, cyber vulnerabilities need to be reduced and ensured that hackers are unable to use same digital highway and smart platform to steal vital information.
“Even as a security provider, I won’t say that breach is impossible and all the attacks could be prevented but it is important to ensure that alarm bells must ring, when somebody is trying to breach or steal the data. India is already a dominating IT power, both the Digital India and the Smart Cities initiatives have potential to project India as a role model for ensuring security of critical infrastructure but for that, country will have to embed security measures at every stage of these projects,” Raimund Genes, Chief Technology Officer, Trend Micro told FE.
Adding that government should come out with a basic security standards for devices and if any company does not comply with the standards, it should not be allowed to do business, something which already exists in Europe.
One of other areas that country needs to address is under reporting of cyber security incidents. Unfortunately, the under reporting of cyber security incidents is a norm these days. Companies do not report about cyber breaches, because they feel that they may not get a conducive response from governmental agencies. They also fear that if they report a security breach, the reputation of their company might take a hit.
Also, currently it is not mandatory for companies to report the breaches in India. “This needs to be changed if you really want to secure the cyber frontier of the Digital India and Smart Cities,” said Genes, adding that one of the key missed opportunities for the world have been that there is no post breach analysis of Ashley Madison and Sony data breaches. Companies should report at least to the concerned authorities of such breaches. Also, that should come under the global breach notification law.
Understanding the augmented demand for cyber security solution that may come from an integrated digital footprint created by Digital India and Smart Cities, companies such as Trend Micro are gearing up to play its role. “We are an early adopter and always analyse the market to invest,” he said.
The Tokyo, Japan, headquartered security software company already has substantial presence in India. Its R&D centre in Bangalore with ‘Deep Security Platform’ has delivered automated and highly scalable cloud security for data centres. Company is also mulling to work with some of startups. “We will help Indian startups and if they need additional research, we are ready to collaborate,” Genes said.
Globally, security companies are witnessing subdued demand for anti-virus solutions, leading to enhance focus on enterprise market. Same is the story in India, Trend Micro which recently acquired HP TippingPoint to strengthen its enterprise security offerings is also increasing it focus on Indian enterprise and government segments.
“We were focusing on the enterprise market since the inception. We had developed the gateway protection first in 1996 and the server base cyber protection in 1993 which was licensed to Intel. Our most of the revenue comes from enterprise segment,” he said, adding that most of the security company is seeing declined in consumer market for anti-virus because the market is small.
“Even for the other player like Kaspersky Lab and Symantec, the antivirus market is smaller and it depends on the PC’s sale, which is declining, as now people prefer to use mobile devices like tablet and smartphone.” he added.
