Sophos believes AI will redefine the security landscape

In a chat with VARINDIA, Sunil Sharma, Managing Director for sales - Sophos India & SAARC discusses about the present security landscape, trends and future of the Industry -

The Indian market of security products is growing at a very strong pace. The rise in enterprise security spending and the increasing concerns regarding security has also led to the growth of this security market.The Indian market holds a lot of potential, especially after the recent advancement in security technologies.

People have started to understand that high-end cyber security is the only panacea to immune organisations against cyber breaches. With the recent technological development and cyber-attacks, businesses across verticals have started investing in highly advanced security systems and services. Hence, the digital-based security products market is constantly emerging and have started to rule the Indian market.

Sophos, a global provider of cloud-enabled end user and network security solutions has been into this industry for more than three decades from now. Sophos as an organisation believes in keeping IT security simple and reliable. 

Talking on the latest trends in the present security landscape, Sunil Sharma, Managing Director for sales - Sophos India & SAARC says, “As of today, if you talk about trend, it’s all about machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence; it is about trends of protecting the unknown because when you protect the known there is a known security solution which is available but when you protect the unknown you need to have the protected security. Just like Sophos that secures its customers with intercept X.”

Sunil further adds, “Intercept X takes care of any kind of exploits prevention, any kind of ransomware attack with technology like cryptoguard, and use the right kind of analysis to understand with the root cause of a particular threat. Intercept X is also able to clean up any kind of malware with the help of Sophos Clean, which is a part and parcel of this comprehensive solution.”

With the array of security solutions, Sophos is looking forward to transform the security landscape.Talking about this and its portfolio, Sunil tells, “Apart from Intercept X, we have solutions starting from endpoint security traditional antivirus to encryptions. We have server protection solutions which are one of the best security solutions we are providing today which are also endpoint security. Then we have email security, web security, UTM, Wi-Fi, also the phishthreat which is the simulation tool for educating and spreading the awareness amongst the users. These are the kind of solutions that we have. The best thing about our endpoint security and network security products are that they talk to each other; there is a synchronisation that helps in putting up the best defence in retaliating to any threats, thus protecting the user from the unknown and known kind of threats.”

When asked about the company’s expectations from FY 18, he reveals, “Sophos is growing almost twice than the financial revenue of last year on the endpoint security business and we continue to grow again this financial year with a similar kind of number. I think we are very gung-ho about this market. The Market is growing and we have the right kind of products to address this market.”

With the Indian market witnessing an increasing demand in security solutions and systems, this has led to the emerging of competition in the market. And with the growing competition in the security industry, it has made necessary for businesses to stay in competition with a competitive strategy to outshine their competitors in the market. 

Talking on this, Sunil explains, “We try to be cutting edge because of our innovation. Although we have cutting edge technology by the virtue of our expense and research and development and innovation, we would like to make security very simple to use and easy to use by the customers and that is what differentiate ourselves from any of our competition vendors.”

Explaining further, he tells, “Our go-to-market strategy is very simple, we sell 100%through channel, and have 2000+ partners. We sell through them, educate them, train them and enable them to secure our customers.”

It is believed that AI will further boost the industry as it comes with a number of substantial benefits which make it different from the mainstream technologies. When asked about implementing AI in its products, Sunil asserts, “As of today we already have products like Intercept X which has deep learning and machine learning capabilities and now on the network security we already have Sandstorm technology where we have made the machine learning a part of our products. So in all of our products, moving forward, we will try and make this as the core of our technology area.”