Rupal Shah Hollenback, President of cybersecurity solutions company, Check Point Software Technologies, has said the cybersecurity threat landscape is bigger than ever before.
“The bad actors, they’re not just coming in through the network. They’re coming in through anywhere from 17 to 45 entry points in an organisation, posing a bigger cybersecurity challenge than ever before,” she told businessline.
The cybersecurity threat landscape in India is getting wider. It reports 1,787 attacks a week on average in an organisation. This is in the last six months. Compare this with the global average of 983, nearly double the number of attacks that are being reported in India.
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“Whoever thought that cybersecurity wasn’t important in India is wrong. Interestingly, the most attacked industry segment in India is healthcare industry, while it manufacturing and financial sectors globally,” she said.
“It (healthcare industry) is a vulnerable industry. A lot of private citizen data and that of healthcare staff is at risk. After the healthcare industry, it is government and Defence sectors that are attack most. The third vulnerable category for cyber attacks is education sector,” she said.
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Common grounds
The top-3 vulnerable industry segments have something in common – a hybrid infrastructure, on-premises and cloud. “Plus, they are using regular digital devices at the consumer-facing front. You have industries that are using the cloud more and more, while using endpoints, IoT devices and consumer devices at the same time. So, the threat landscape has changed fundamentally in India,” she pointed out.
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Opportunity in India
She said the opportunity in India was pretty significant in the backdrop of the country’s efforts to create a national ID for citizens and promote digitisation in various sectors.
“As the country becomes digitised, automatically the threat landscape gets bigger. Digitisation just brings in bad cyber actors. There are always bad actors exist on the ground. But now, these bad actors have gone digital,” she pointed out.
Because of the government’s digitisation push, the country becomes the largest digital market in the world. If it’s one of the most digitised markets and a market with a large penetration of mobile phones, it becomes more vulnerable.
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“So the threat landscape is getting massive in India very quickly. Our emphasis is on partnering both with the public sector and private sector to drive secure digitisation,” she said.
“We no longer are a company that’s been built on the network firewall. While the network firewall is our DNA, but we offer a much broader solution today in the marketplace than we ever have before,” she says.
The company, she said, has dedicated teams that are in conversation with the public and private sectors. “Besides, we work with system integrators (IT services companies) to bring in the solutions to the marketplace,” she said.
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The company, which has operations in India for over 20 years, said it is growing inorganically too by making acquisitions, particularly in the cloud security.
“Our business has changed fundamentally in terms of our product line. We put the entire architecture that we have, we put it under the umbrella of Infinity architecture. It is one single strategy for the network, for cloud, and for endpoint and remote access,” she said.
It allowed us to approach the most heavily attacked industries in India with something that is comprehensive. “This is a unique value proposition that we have. While the cybersecurity challenges are getting complex, the solutions that we bring to market don’t need to be overly complicated,” she pointed out.
