Channel partners are integral to Kaspersky's overall success

Recognized as experts in the fight against malware and cybercrime, Kaspersky is relentlessly transforming innovative security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. In Kaspersky’s IT Security Economics Report, it was found that threat intelligence is considered an area of investment for 41% of enterprises and 39% of SMBs in response to a data breach. Recognition from Forrester highlights leading providers for these organizations, who are looking for the most holistic insights off the back of independent analysis and evaluation. In a chat with VARINDIA, Sachin Relwani, Channel Head, Kaspersky (South Asia) shares his viewpoints about their EDR/Next Generation products, channel strategy, partner program and targeted verticals etc.

How can Kaspersky's EDR/Next Generation products can Predict, Prevent, Detect and Respond to cyber-attacks?

A traditional approach to cybersecurity is no longer good enough. Dealing with advanced threats requires advanced tools such as endpoint detection and response. Kaspersky’s Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and other next-generation solutions like EDR Optimum, Anti- Targeted Attack Platform provides an advanced level of security that is required in today’s constantly evolving threat landscape.

Kaspersky’s EDR is a cybersecurity solution that helps in predicting, preventing, detecting and responding to an attack by offering real-time monitoring, which focuses heavily on security analytics and incident response on corporate endpoints. It delivers true end-to-end visibility into the activity of every endpoint in the corporate infrastructure, managed from a single console, together with valuable security intelligence for use by an IT security expert in further investigation and response.

Kaspersky’s more recent next-generation endpoint protection platforms use machine learning and deep-level detection mechanisms for threat hunting and discovery, and also focus on delivering antimalware protection (predicting and preventing attacks).

The main aim of Kaspersky’s EDR is the proactive detection of new or unknown threats, previously unidentified infections penetrating the organization directly through endpoints and servers. This is achieved by analysing events in the gray zone, home of those objects or processes included in neither the “trusted” nor the “definitely malicious” zone. Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response provides a multifaceted approach to revealing and recognizing complex threats by using advanced technologies. It responds to prevent future malicious actions through the timely discovery of advanced threats, sending the verdicts to Kaspersky Endpoint Security for follow-up blocking.

Kaspersky has changed the way it engages and incentivizes the channel through a new and simplified partner program. What is the GTM to attract the VARs ?

Kaspersky’s United Partner program is one of its most prominent and popular partner programs that has been appreciated by our partners across the globe. Kaspersky United has not only provided many incentives to our partners, but has also helped them grow their businesses by specializing and enhancing their skills in their fields of interest. Specializations have helped our partners in gaining the consumers trust and maintaining their credibility in the market.

Channel partners are integral to Kaspersky overall success. We work with channel partners and strategize with them to deliver a better customer experience and meet their cybersecurity needs. As such, we are utilizing our Channel Partner network to reach all customers spanning all ecosystems. Each year, we continue to see quite a number of new partners recruited.

Brief on the channel strategy for India and South Asia as the region and what are the marketing activities you have in place to achieve the target?

Being a 100% channel centric company, we at Kaspersky always look at strengthening our channel ecosystem and working with them to achieve our targets.

Our strategies mainly revolve around aggressively training our existing partners, sharing with them information about the evolving threat landscape and keeping them updated on our solutions and services that can help fight against these threats. We constantly try to understand the needs and problems of our partners and offer them solutions accordingly.

Through our channel strategies in India as well as South Asia, we ensure that our partners get to enjoy enhanced benefits when they qualify in terms of quality parameters on their sales and tech teams. Through our Marketing activities we try to create and increase cybersecurity awareness as much as possible amongst our end consumers and clients. Many times we achieve this goal by providing thorough training to our partners and regional distributors who in turn help our consumers with their acquired knowledge and help them in deploying the correct solutions according to their needs.

For our end customers, we try to motivate them to embrace cybersecurity by the way of promotions and great discounts/ offers and rewards.

Which are targeted verticals you have identified as the growth engine for Kaspersky?

At Kaspersky we are aiming to strengthen our foothold furthermore in the B2B sector, especially targeting businesses of all sizes, government, BFSI, manufacturing, healthcare sectors as well as securing critical infrastructure in the region with our advanced next-generation solutions and services.

Majority of our business has been through advanced technologies like Encryption, Threat Intelligence, Serve Security and Anti APT and we further foresee huge growth from our Industrial Cybersecurity solutions. This will be able to cover the entire threat landscape from IT security to OT security.

What are the pain points of the channel partners to see cybercrime is at an all-time high. On this backdrop, how is Kaspersky addressing the cause ?

The increase in cybercrime was a challenge not only for enterprises but also channel partners that were constantly supporting them remotely and trying to resolve problems as soon as possible to mitigate the risks. We at Kaspersky understood this and made sure that our sales/ support team were in constant touch with our partners and helped them in getting through a challenging situation.

We even conducted various training sessions with our partners in order to keep them updated on the current threat landscape and our solutions/services that could help overcome these threats in real time. We made sure that our partners had enough units of stock with them throughout and also worked with them on credit for longer periods ensuring that their businesses kept running as usual. With the help of our Force 1.0 application, we helped our partners achieve contactless delivery while keeping their businesses running and regularly updated them with our ongoing offers and promotions.