WinMagic is a cybersecurity company headquartered in Ontario, Canada. It deals in encryption solutions that provide data protection to governments and enterprises. The firm started operation in India 5 years ago. First two years were spent setting up operations and over the last three years, it has step up efforts to acquire new clients. Today, it has about 200 clients in sectors such as BFSI, healthcare and IT/ITeS with over 1.5 lakh devices using the WinMagic's encryption solutions. In an interview with TechObserver.in Sanjay Singh, Rahul Kumar, Country Manager, WinMagic India said, “We will continue to grow this market in India focusing on BSFI, healthcare & pharma, IT/ ITES and government sectors. India is a key market for WinMagic and we see it as a big growth market for us. Our corporate is continuing to invest in Indian market.”
Implementation of Wi-Fi hotspots for rural areas which has been announced in Union Budget 2018 would need serious cybersecurity investments. Where do you see cybersecurity market in India going?
This move of the government is a positive one towards going the digital route across the length and breath of the country. Having said that in digitalization, the biggest challenge is and will be security. The thinking is that organisations and IT professionals think that they will adapt to digitalization and worry about the security it requires later. But the fact remains that it always must be the other way around. If you digitalize something, you have to think through the process such as how much are you moving forward and what is the threat landscape that needs to be covered.
When it comes to Indian cybersecurity landscape, we find that the understanding is there and it is ever increasing. The snag is between the IT teams and their businesses. While IT teams understand this very well, somewhere they get stuck between the larger business interests and ask for implementation of security technologies, you see these require considerable amount of money and resources. Unfortunately, not many IT persons are confident to even pitch their ideas to get a certain budget for security purpose. The key problem in India is admitting to the fact that IT is not able to position security's importance within the management as much as it should.
Encryption adoption seems to be rising. What should be the deciding factor for adopting encryption technology?
Yes, more and more companies across industry segments have recognised the need for protecting their data and are reaching out to us for solutions. And yet there are many who are not sure. It's important to understand the risks an organisation is taking by not securing its data. The team should define the risks that have to be dealt with on priority. This will help to further analyse the relevant technologies and designing a very comprehensive process of adopting those technologies. Understanding risks, defining what risks are a priority and keeping the others in the risk appetite is the correct way to adopt security solutions.
The other deciding factor to adopting encryption technology are the costs involved. Managing an end point encryption tool is traditionally seen as an expensive affair with multiple helpdesk admins required. Companies need to do a cost benefit analysis on this and sort their priorities in terms of data security.
Many companies use BitLocker as their primary endpoint encryption tool, as its ‘free'. Is BitLocker the right answer though?
Integration of BitLocker into the operating system is a good first step in improving data security. It is a good encryption method to start with. What is required is an effective way to manage BitLocker. WinMagic does that for its key customers. For example, one of the largest beverage companies in India uses WinMagic to manage Bitlocker. The advantages of using a third-party tool to effectively manage BitLocker is paramount and customers understand that nothing is “free” – you pay in terms of over TCO, ease of management, security to name a few.
Your company recently launched a data security solution aimed Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). What opportunity do you see for such a solution in India?
As the demand for more sophisticated, highly secure, always-on infrastructure grows, the need for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions will become imperative. We see that Hyper-convergence is a rapidly exploding markets worldwide and this will displace traditional server and storage models sometime soon in the near future. WinMagic wants to be ahead of this curve and our recently launched solution has been fully validated to help HCI customers attain greater control and certainty over their data.
So far, In India our solutions help enterprises unify and improve data security across physical, virtualized (VM and VDI) and cloud computing environments (Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM), regardless of the operating system. We have customers from Indian BFSI industry already using our solution to secure their server infrastructure across their hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Is Cloud VM a solution ahead of its time, especially in India? Isn't the security offered by the cloud Service Provider's enough?
India is now quite at par with what's happening globally. Many Indian companies who lead in their areas of business take data security very seriously. As mentioned before, just relying on the cloud service provider is a risk companies may not want to take specially in the long run. With the rise of remote working and BYOD culture, organizations can become vulnerable to attacks on data, software and systems hosted on cloud.
A cloud service provider offers protection with features such as privilege access, network segmentation and host-based and network-based intrusion system among others but organizations need to implement their own security on top of what is provided by the cloud service provider. They need to ensure that their data is persistently encrypted always and to control all aspects of data security.
What is the anticipated impact of the EUGDPR on the global marketplace and how Indian companies should prepare their organizations for GDPR compliance?
The new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with its implications is going to be a major concern for almost every organization doing business in the EU. The time to prepare for it is now as the deadline on it is like right around the corner in May. The objective is to protect the “digital citizen” and ensure a single digital market, meaning the objective is to not merely protect information but also to authenticate legitimate users.
Globally companies will now have an obligation to protect personal information no matter how it is processed. This will mean a complete re-examination of the way they store data – including focusing on cloud apps that may be used across an organisation. In addition, companies will also have to look beyond simple data residence and consider the paths their data travels.
Indian IT industry would also have to do the same and observe what GDPR is proposing as a “Global Regulation” and the restrictions it would impose.
What are you plans for 2018 in terms of business focus?
WinMagic is about 5 years old in India and the first couple of years were spent setting up operations and last three years on acquiring clients. Today we enjoy the association of close to 200 clients in sectors such as BFSI, healthcare, and IT/ITeS with over 1.5lac devices (desktops, laptops and servers) having the WinMagic's encryption. We will continue to grow this market in India focusing on BSFI, Healthcare & Pharma, IT/ ITES and Government sectors. India is a key market for WinMagic and we see it as a big growth market for WinMagic. Our corporate is continuing to invest in Indian market.
