Forcepoint perceives the security industry primarily to be very threat focused

With a mission to reinvent cybersecurity, Forcepoint aspires to create uncompromising systems that understand people’s behaviours and motivations as they interact with data and IP everywhere. Forcepoint is the cyber security arm of Raytheon Technology, large defence equipment manufacturer and supplier to various governments across the world.

According to Ajay Dubey, Country Head- NetSec and Channels Forcepoint, cyber security has always been an industry where the hackers seem to have the edge. The hackers find a new way to hack and technology vendors go and find a way to stop it and hackers again find a new way and get that installed.

Ajay finds the security industry primarily to be very threat focused. The industry is focused on the hackers and even there are people who are trying to stop the threats. In Ajay’s words threats will continue to be there. There's no way to stop the hackers from various countries and hackers within India and within the states.

Vulnerability & Behavior Management

Ajay feels vulnerability will continue to be as it is, and that hackers and threats cannot be stopped. Vulnerability cannot be completely got rid of. “Forcepoint is trying to flip this entire game towards a behavior based approach. We are trying to analyze the behavior of a certain persona. Within every organization can there be people who have fallen into certain kind of persona. We have premium technology, which can identify the behavior of the various personas in the normal course of the day. If they have been hacked or they are turning out to be a threat to the organization, their behavior pattern would change.”

Forcepoint has found out ways if any vulnerability is detected. “If we know the behaviour and once we know that there is a change or deviation in the behavior, then we can put ‘one plus one is equal to two’ together and then we can accordingly take action in terms of what needs to be done depending on the person, on the type of change in behavior, how severe it is etc. User can be removed from the network; user can be isolated or can be monitored or just put under the radar. We can do a host of things depending on the behaviour. This is also called as Risk-Adaptive protection, that protection is based on the current risk level. It is based on the behavioral causes of the human centric cyber security, which can be found in our website. Human centric cyber security means we analyze the behaviours and whenever there is a change in behavior, we take action accordingly.” explains Ajay.

The security trends in India

Ajay himself being a CISO thinks that in the last five years many CISOs have been created the job profile for people. Regarding this Ajay says, “In India, people are becoming more and more aware. The awareness level about the various vulnerable threats is changing. In the last five years many CISOs profile have been created. Five years ago CISOs were not a very powerful position and it was only in some large organizations. Today, virtually every mid-sized to large organization has a CISO and they are becoming very powerful person. Security is also going to the board. People are discussing security at the board level. People are talking about application security, network security, data security network being against secure all kinds of securities built into their enablers now and a business differentiator.”

Forcepoint enabling the digital future

Ajay perceives that one of the key components of digital transformation is cloud. Today, many customers have migrated; all are on the way to migrate from their current applications and services to the cloud. As people start moving to the cloud, they think it is the cloud vendors’ responsibility to give them security, and then they realize that the cloud vendor has certain limitations in what he can check their money cannot and what they need to do so in terms of digital transformation. At this point, Ajay thinks, the most positive thing is the cloud adoption. Forcepoint enables all of their current solutions to be cloud ready or to become cloud first.

AI to boost or reduce cyber crimes

Forcepoint along with its partners is actively countering cybercrime and fraud. But Ajay feels the hackers are always ahead in the game. According to him, “Artificial Intelligence is just like a new Swiss knife that somebody has found and somebody has put to use. So it is up to the hackers who will definitely jump onto it and will find ways to use AI to hack. But the vendors of technology are behind. They are also using the same swift knife to protect the public at large and the customers that they have from the hackers. I believe that statement that AI is being used, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is actively used by hackers first, and then the industry will do a catch up job and will definitely cover. The industry is far more resourceful and it has slightly more brain than people and money behind it and it will always find a way to overcome this threat from the hackers.”

Lastly

Forcepoint is enabling behavioural analytics on their products to keep their customers safe. “We are moving all of our customers one by one step to enable the behavioural analytics onto their existing products. We have been conducting secure talks across all the major cities in India and other major markets and training people and building awareness. We have been actively engaging and training our people, our customers, our partners, our community in all the latest tools,” concludes Ajay.