Cisco helping organizations to achieve resilience

In this evolving Digital world, trust is an essential factor for organizations and security plays an important role to build this trust. At present every organization is talking about cybersecurity resilience and in this journey Cisco is supporting customers to build a resilient enterprise. In a chat with VARINDIA, Samir Kumar Mishra, Director, Security Business, Cisco India & SAARC discusses how Cisco is building trust among customers, the major concerns of CIOs, skill gap, edge computing, 5G and much more.

How Cisco is building trust among customers in this vulnerable Digital world?

India is a top priority for Cisco and we remain committed to the country. We see a massive shift towards digitization and in the shift to the new digital world, security is a key enabler for growth and competence. Now security is not an IT or a network problem, it is more of a societal and organizational problem. Organizations are today talking about resilience. How do we build cybersecurity resilience? Because you can have resilience in supply chain, organization and finance but all will fail if you do not have a security resilience. So Cisco is helping organizations to build a resilient enterprise. What I mean by that is, if you talk of resilience in general, it is not a question of time whether the breach will happen; rather it is a question of time when the breach will happen. And the best practice that organizations need to follow is what are the tools and processes they have when the breach happens. Preventing is one part of it and how do they mitigate and remediate that attack is another. So, that is where Cisco is helping organizations to build a resilient enterprise.

What are the major concerns of CIOs?

In cybersecurity the biggest challenge at present is scarcity of skills. In worldwide data last year, around 4 million cybersecurity jobs were unfilled. So that is where the biggest challenge is. Another is how we start automating it because the volume of data and the volume of telemetry is so much that you cannot have only people to do it. So you need to automate it. One of the biggest challenges that CIOs are facing is automating and building a platform-based approach which Cisco is focused on. We are working on an integrated platform approach which connects and protects. In that same process we are investing in infrastructure, innovation, and talent to help CIOs mitigate some of these challenges.

How is Cisco addressing the challenge of the skill gap?

Cybersecurity skill is a very integral part of the investments and we are making it through NetAcad, where we also train people, create cybersecurity awareness. Second, we have partnered with NIIT Foundation to launch the CyberSuraksha program with a commitment to train one million underprivileged individuals in cybersecurity by 2025. The project commenced in March 2022, and we have trained more than 100,000 individuals in cybersecurity. Third, if you look at the cybersecurity world traditionally you have a homogeneous set of people. Everybody is coming with a practitioner mindset, people who are very technical but cybersecurity has to be democratised for the masses. For that we need a mix of people in the cybersecurity area which has practitioners, women, people from liberal arts, product management etc. Because when we are developing a product or solution we have to be representative of the entire mass we are representing.

Cisco has a very robust partner program. We have over 1500 partners in the country. So now we have launched new programs and certifications based on outcomes like supporting a hybrid workforce, what customers are looking at is outcomes. We are working on how we enable and skill the partner sales force to be able to give outcome based solutions to the customer. So that is one area that we are working on. Other areas we are working on in terms of joint investments we are doing with the partners in terms of technology, proof of value, center of excellence where the partners can go and demonstrate to the customers.

Do you think edge computing and 5G will make the cyber landscape more vulnerable?

If you look at the new world, in the last two years the pace of change is so rapid and we have moved from a static to a very dynamic world. Earlier all of us used to come to the office to work now you are working from anywhere. So what do we need? We need secure and faster access to applications from wherever we want to login. So this is creating opportunities because organization work is not where you go but what you do, essentially. Having said that, as we move from a static to dynamic model it is creating challenges in terms of cybersecurity and that is how Cisco is working with the customer to create a robust framework and a platform-based approach so that customers are able to work on cybersecurity strategy. So opportunities are going to scale up.

What are the products you offer to the hybrid workforce?

Every customer is transforming across segments not only IT services, banking but we are seeing transformation happening in manufacturing, they are adopting cloud. If the transformation has to happen it starts with application transformation and it cannot happen until you do network and security transformation. Cisco plays the role both in network and security transformation. Talking about hybrid, for example I am here and I want to access my mail, office 365, which is on the SAS cloud so you have to secure the user. Wherever I am going my user needs to be protected. So we have solutions which we launched, we are investing more in a data center. We added a data center in Chennai and expanded capacity in Mumbai. We secure user access and faster access to SAS applications and the internet from wherever they are connected. The new data centers will increase the capacity and users are closer to the data center, so the user experience is better. If you are accessing an application then you need a better user experience. If you are seeing latency and not able to access the application your productivity will go down. So Cisco is helping with all these products from security and collaboration to make hybrid work a seamless and a great experience.

We are working on simplification and customers are looking at vendor consolidation. If you look at cybersecurity it is being seen as prohibitor for productivity and we have data which says 51% of breaches which happen to humans are because of negligence as they find their system very complex and they are not able to use it. So we are working on a simplification, integrated platform approach that connects and protects wherever the user is connecting to a network or application he/she is always protected.