“Threat landscape is getting more sophisticated and pervasive”

In a chat with VARINDIA, Joergen Jakobsen, Regional Vice President and Managing Director, sales, APJ, Sophos, mentions that cybersecurity is the fastest-growing segment and the company sees huge opportunity in the Indian market. The cybercrimes are becoming more sophisticated and structured with each passing day

The recent cyber-attacks that took place across the globe have been a wake-up call for all the companies to pull up their socks and undertake necessary measures to combat threats. Sophos solutions have been successful in identifying the threats in recent attacks for its customers.    

“For cybersecurity it is a huge opportunity. The market segment itself is growing fast. It has a lot of momentum because in the last couple of quarters there has been some very high-profile breaches like WannaCry and such other attacks that have been a wake-up call for many customers that they need to do something for cybersecurity. For Sophos specifically, it has been a challenging environment because the solutions that we have are playing very well in the case of ransomware, for example. The solutions that we have built are very easy for partners to deploy at customer’s place,” says Joergen.  

Sophos is a 100% partner-driven company and it designs its products for partners as it becomes easier for the channel to sell solutions. Due to the vast geographical arena and to reach a broad customer base, Sophos works through partners in India. The opportunity in the Asia-Pacific market is immense as everybody is shifting to digital enterprise and is interrupted by cybercrimes.    

  
“So, in Asia-Pacific we sell 100% through partners and we design our products in many cases for partners so they can easily sell them to customers. That is why there is a lot over a couple of years in Asia-Pacific because of places like India. A lot of businesses are done by partners because of geographical requirement in India. So the way to get to a very broad customer base is through partners with products that are easy to deploy. It is always right from the vendor’s point of view to enhance our products, build better security products for customers and I foresee that it continues because one of the things that are happening on the line is everybody is moving to digital enterprise. 

To reach every customer, Sophos has a wide partner base and the company also focusses on training and enablement of them. The company invests significantly in partner enablement. 

“In India, we have a broad partner ecosystem because geographically it is a very large country. So we try to balance two things – one is having a partner coverage so that our customers all over India will have a partner in their proximity. The other thing which we are working on is depth of the partners, the level of expertise that the partners have and we have a very significant amount of investment around enablement of the partners. So we do a lot in training and enablement, motivating partners in terms of promotion, incentives, etc. We are quite unique in Sophos for the fact that there is a customer design centre where we develop products. We also have a partner design centre. So we spend time understanding the requirements of partners for them to be successful,” elaborates Joergen.
 

Security landscape
Cybercrimes are becoming  more  sophisticated and well structured. There are provisions easily available to conduct an organized crime. The most common ways of attacks in recent days are ransomware and hacking.  

“Cybercrime is getting relatively well structured and organized. It is not difficult to go into the dark web where it is almost an organized crime, you can go into certain websites and with what is available there you can go and attack companies. The people who would do it on our behalf will take a share of what you get in ransom. The threat landscape is getting more sophisticated, pervasive and easier to do. A lot of attacks that we see today are around either ransomware because that is the good way for cybercriminals to monetize the effort or hacking/ stealing information,” describes Joergen.  

To combat the cyber threats, from the technology point of view the cybersecurity companies required to come up with more sophisticated solutions. Sophos is uniquely positioned as its broad portfolio provides security at both endpoints and network.      

“To protect customers from these attacks, we need to up our game which means from the technology point of view our technology becomes sophisticated. We look at behaviours that are happening and the latest thing about Sophos products are, the companies that enjoy artificial intelligence and machine learning which will be able to automate at a higher level some of these things. Sophos is actually unique that we have a broad portfolio of security products at endpoints and also at network. If there is a problem happening on one product then that product will communicate to all the other products and identify the breach and inform the firewall and it will communicate with the encryption tool. All of those habits are integrated and automated,” states Joergen.       

Digitalization, risks and measures
While India is becoming a digital society, every individual and organization should consider them as risk and this is the best way to think about cybersecurity. When people go through revolution, they only look at the opportunities but do not think about creating a safe and secure infrastructure.   

“The Indian Government is aspiring to become a digital society and a lot of initiatives are being taken in that direction both at the government and enterprise level. Everybody – be it the government entities, customers or individuals – should consider them at risk because it’s the best way to start thinking about cybersecurity. It has been a couple of years when internet was taking off and people look at the opportunity when they go through a kind of revolution going into digital world, they really do not think about creating a safe infrastructure at the same time. So I think it’s a good advice to everybody to start thinking that they are vulnerable,” explains Joergen.  

Discussing about the measures, he says, “To talk about what people can do to protect themselves better, I often talk about the three Ps – People, how do people look at this, I think everybody needs to consider that the company has the responsibility of security of the company. The first defence will be to create awareness among the people of the risks. The second P is Patching software. It is relatively easy but not always done. If you are running a software, then you need to patch the software to the latest version because in the new version a number of security risks are taken care of by the vendors. The third is Protection. There are a number of products and technologies that help protect against cybercrimes. In Sophos, we have a suite of those technologies. The companies need to have cybersecurity strategy to protect themselves.” 

Aparna Mullick
aparna@varindia.com