In the business of simplifying security

Cyber security startup, Sequretek, was established in 2013 by Pankit Desai and Anand Naik, with an attempt to re-look at how security was being consumed by enterprises in the changing IT landscape. “We quickly came to a conclusion that the way the industry has evolved and the problems were being addressed, there was a dire need to to simplify security and drive down the cost of security ownership for enterprises,” says Pankit Desai, Co-founder and CEO, Sequretek, adding with pride that his company has emerged as the fastest growing home grown cyber security company in the past couple of years by offering differentiated solutions to the market. Sequretek is now gearing up for a North American foray by the end of this year.

Headquartered in Mumbai, with offices in Delhi and Bangalore, Sequretek has an employee strength of more than 300 people. The startup is backed by marquee investors like Unicorn India Ventures, GVFL, Sharad Sanghi, MD & CEO, Netmagic and a few Indian and international investors.

Products and solutions
Sequretek currently has three main offerings in the areas of — Identity Governance & Administration (IGA), Endpoint Detection Protection & Response (EDPR), and Managed Detection and Response (MDR). IGA is an access governance solutions which is deployed by companies to govern access to technology assets (application, network, infrastructure) to employees, vendors and other third party across their lifecycle (joiner-mover-leaver) in the company. “Currently, a majority of the organisation provide such accesses using manual processes or ad hoc systems creating a potential security risk to the organisation in the event of such access not commensurate with the role of the individual. With the changing business landscape and businesses moving towards digital even in traditional economies, there is an increasing threat of an attack originating from within the company or due to undefined access, giving a backroom entry to hackers. Thus, defining access privilege is the first step towards protecting enterprise data from any breaches,” mentions Desai.

EDPR is an enterprise grade endpoint security solution, which is AI Powered. Desai states that at Sequretek, they believe that the user is the endpoint and not the device, which is an old thought process. “Today, a single user can access same data from multiple devices — desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablets and even smart watch. To secure each device at least eight-nine products are needed like anti-virus, anti- advanced persistent threat, Application whitelisting, patch management, device control, mobile security, data loss prevention etc. EDPR packs a punch of all these products into one leveraging the latest technology stack e.g. AI, this helps in responding different kind of threats by activating the needed feature of the product,” he says, adding that the way the product is designed results in reducing the management overhead attached to running each technology independently as well as taking advantage of synergies between multiple security algorithms there by improving the overall security risk posture.

Reminding that there has been significant focus on automated detection of security threats using next generation technologies like Deep Learning and Big Data Analytics, and innovation being driven towards automate response/recovery, Desai remarks that Sequretek’s cloud based MDR platform today crunches about 160 million events on a daily basis across 8000+ devices and has been successful in preventing major attacks in its customers base. “The company has built out its own threat intelligence feeds (sourcing data from over 80 sources worldwide), a dedicated malware research lab that works in conjunction with the analysts for better response to threats and leveraging ML technologies for better prediction,” he adds.

Enterprise clients
Sequretek works with more than 50 enterprise clients in verticals like BFSI, pharma, media, manufacturing, retail, etc. According to Desai, customers look at Sequretek’s solutions primarily from two angles i.e brand protection and continuous compliance to regulations. “With EDPR, our platform based approach to security vis-a-vis deploying series of point products takes away the complexity attached to the security landscape. In case of MDR, our customers get comfort in knowing that someone is watching over them 24×7 and has the capability to generate actionable threat intelligence and respond to it in real time. Whilst our IGA offering ensures continuous compliance to the access governance related challenges with an architecture that allows deployment in a few months as against a few years with a significantly lower cost of ownership,” he explains.

Reiterating that the DNA of the organisation is to simplify security and that can only be achieved if the focus is on innovation, Desai mentions, “We have built our entire line of products and solutions by keeping our customers at the heart of it. We run an in house R&D and a product development setup that has created a very large repository of threats from global sources and we apply Deep Learning and ML on the same to identify if similar such patterns are occurring in any of our clients’ environment.” These efforts help the company stay ahead of the curve and is the quickest way to find if an attack is coming or even audit security systems for any vulnerabilities which can fixed before it can trigger an attack.

“Such innovative approach, where we are using the latest tech to identify good from bad, will continue to form our base as we apply our solutions to more evolved digital concepts like IoT and cloud security,” affirms Desai.

The future plans include launching of operations in North America, the world’s largest cyber security market. Sequretek is in the final stages of opening an office in the greater New York and a near shore centre in Canada. The company has plans to hire locally engineers, data scientists, analysts, sales and marketing workforce.

Desai points out that Sequretek is proud of its origin and believes that its ability to understand the threat landscape along with nuances of the India specific constraints has helped in building a resource frugal technology, that not only works very well for the domestic needs but can scale and service global requirements.