As more and more Indian enterprises, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and startups begin their Cloud journey, securing the data is paramount and for global cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, automating the security systems via Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities can thwart hacking plans of nation-state bad actors.
The company which has been operating in India for the last seven years with Mumbai as its base, is now investing heavily into research and development (R&D) at its Bengaluru facility.
“We have nearly 100 people working at the R&D facility. We will continue to invest in expanding our reach to customer and product development in India and securing the Cloud journey for our customers – for both network and enterprise data centre security,” Varun Badhwar, SVP, Public Cloud Security, Palo Alto Networks, told IANS.
As more and more businesses go digital, they are generating more and more data.
“There are more security alerts and large enterprises will tell you that they’re struggling with the volume of alerts that need to be investigated that requires a lot of automation. We look at leveraging AI and ML to automate a lot of those security tasks,” explained Badhwar.
India market is quite an interesting case for him.
“According to third-party statistics, the data centre market in India will be about $4 billion by 2024 but the Cloud market in the country will hit $7 billion by 2022. You can see the acceleration of Cloud, especially the Public Cloud which is far outpacing data centres in the country,a the executive mentioned.
The Cloud adoption is across the spectrum – banking and financial services, retail, high tech and what not.
Palo Alto Networks has made a slew of acquisitions in recent months across cybersecurity verticals. It last month acquired IoT security startup Zingbox for $75 million. According to Badhwar, Internet of Things (IoT) – both industrial and consumer — will soon explode in India.
“We want to make sure that we provide right access to our customers in India, for those which are born in the Cloud as well as traditional enterprises, with the best of cloud security capabilities. We do believe that the Indian market will have a strong prevalence of Hybrid Cloud,” he said, adding that the company is also going to focus a lot on automation to bridge the skill shortage for cybersecurity which is a global problem. We can solve this problem by providing a high degree of automation through our “secure the future” capabilities by leveraging AI and ML,” Badhwar added.
