In an exclusive conversation with APAC News Network & CXO News , Jaydeep Singh, General Manager, India, Kaspersky talks about the solutions available in India and the go-to-market strategy they follow for the country.
What are the products and services currently in the Kaspersky portfolio in India?
India is a key market for us and with the increasing rate of cyber threats looming over consumers, corporates, and government, we have a complete suite of cybersecurity solutions and services for our customers from every segment. For home users, we have a comprehensive three-tier set of solutions – Kaspersky Standard, Kaspersky Plus, and Kaspersky Premium – that can be customized as per their needs. Our consumer portfolio just recently won the top award at AV-Comparatives, a leading European test lab, after outscoring 14 competitors across a series of rigorous tests.
For the corporate segment, we have solutions and services for the SMBs and up to the largest enterprises. Our SMB customers get comprehensive protection from cyberattacks with the award-winning Kaspersky Small Office Security. These solutions are easy-to-use, intuitive cybersecurity solutions that can be managed easily, allowing SMBs to focus on their own business and how to grow it.
For the enterprise segment, we offer solutions and services to meet the complexity of the information systems of organizations from any sector. Our most popular solutions include Kaspersky XDR, Endpoint Security for Business, Anti-Targeted Attack Platform, Industrial CyberSecurity, Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security, Kaspersky Endpoint Detection & Response Expert, and more. We help our clients develop a complete cybersecurity infrastructure that predicts, detects, responds, and prevents cybersecurity breaches and attacks.
This year in India, we have put a major focus on threat intelligence. Our Threat Intelligence Services offer strategic, tactical, and operational intelligence to help organizations stay ahead of cyberattacks that threaten them regularly. Kaspersky Threat Intelligence delivers in-depth visibility to cyber threats and insightful context across the entire cyber incident management cycle.
Also, we have the Kaspersky Industrial Cyber Security (KICS)platform that helps both IT and OT infrastructure to adopt a mature cybersecurity infrastructure. The KICS platform, with natively integrated products and services, has been designed to protect the operational technology layers of enterprises. KICS platform helps to pre-empt threats and vulnerabilities, enforce policies and controls that neutralize threats, respond quickly to threat incidents, and manage complex IT infrastructure from a security standpoint.
How is Kaspersky leveraging AI/ML to gather and analyze real-time data on emerging threats?
AI tools and machine learning (ML) are being used and have become a cause of concern in cyberattacks. Even as these tools help cybercriminals, our experts believe that AI tools can be used for defensive applications against major threats.
Kaspersky has been using ML algorithms, which are a subset of AI, in its solutions for close to 20 years. Combining the power of artificial intelligence and human expertise has enabled our solutions to effectively detect and counter a variety of new threats every day. ML has played an important role in automating threat detection and anomaly recognition and enhancing the accuracy of malware identification.
We have used ML-assisted security to pull data from an attack to be immediately grouped and prepared for analysis. It has provided our cybersecurity teams with simplified reports to make processing and decision-making a cleaner job. This has helped us in offering recommended action for limiting further damage and preventing future attacks on our customers.
Another use of AI/ML is threat detection. Programming based on ML helps highlight commonalities between the new threat and previously identified ones to help spot an attack. This is something that humans cannot effectively do in a timely fashion. ML allows us to offer adaptive security models whenever necessary. From this viewpoint, machine learning potentially makes it easier for teams to also predict new threats and reduce lag time due to increased threat awareness.
How does Kaspersky today differentiate itself in the highly competitive cybersecurity solution provider landscape?
Transparency in every security service, solution, and software that we offer our customers is I think Kaspersky’s USP. In fact, it has been a major driving force in all our business and service decisions. We are promoting the idea of Digital Trust and have launched Kaspersky’s Global Transparency Initiative. In 2023, we completed 5 years of this initiative and we have found a major acceptance among our large customers and critical infrastructure providers in understanding this. In fact, we have invited representatives from the Indian government’s cyber
security agency to visit the GTI center and be part of this initiative.
With the launch of the GTI, Kaspersky became the first cybersecurity company to open its source code for external review. The initiative aims to engage the broader community in validating and verifying the trustworthiness of Kaspersky’s products, internal processes, and business operations. Throughout our GTI journey, we’ve constantly searched for more efficient mechanisms that help our partners and customers enhance trust and assurance in our solutions and services. The launch of various Transparency Centers globally confirms that providing greater transparency about how our technology works and how data is treated is critical to our customers and has helped us build trust with them. This continues to prove the company’s ongoing commitment to enhance transparency and accountability for its
customers and partners.
What are the challenges CISOs are facing today in terms of information overload as well as siloed and distributed data?
One of the key challenges that CISOs face today due to information overload and distributed data is higher instances of human error. When there is siloed or distributed data, it becomes easier for cybercriminals to breach that data. Often sensitive information can be stolen or accessed by unauthorised personnel or cyber crooks. This is a big challenge for CISOs since securing data siloes from cyberattacks is a challenging task and requires complex planning and strategy.
In fact, when there are data silos it becomes easier for users within an organization to violate information security policies. We did an extensive study on this and found that in addition to genuine errors, information security policy violations by employees were one of the biggest problems for companies. Respondents from organizations all over the world claimed that intentional actions to break the cybersecurity rules were made by both non-IT and IT employees.
In terms of individual employee behavior, the most common problem is that employees deliberately do what is forbidden and, conversely, they fail to perform what’s required. Our report shows that 25% of cyber incidents in the last two years occurred due to the use of weak passwords or failure to change them in a timely manner. The other cause of cybersecurity breaches was the result of staff visiting unsecured websites and because employees did not update the system software or applications when it was required.
To avoid this, CISOs need to work with the IT teams to create centralized data storage for easy management and protection.
What are the key pillars on which Kaspersky’s GTM strategy rests in India? What are some of the key initiatives under this strategy?
India is a major market for the company because of its expanding digital landscape and its associated cyber threats. For us customer satisfaction and protection of their data and privacy is of prime importance. Offering threat intelligence services to our SME, Enterprise, and Government customers is a major strategy. We want to help them preempt and prevent cyberattacks.
That is why we are talking about solutions like Kaspersky Threat Intelligence service and KICS solutions to our customers in India.
We are looking to help our existing large customers upgrade their IT & OT security systems with focused security solutions. Help them take a cyber immune strategy rather than just preventive measures against cyber threats.
We are also promoting our brand by partnering with major sports teams to create stronger brand awareness among the home users. We are offering interesting promotions for our target audience in that segment.
What is the overall channel structure that Kaspersky currently follows in India? How are these differentiated between distributors, MSPs, ISVs, and SIs?
Kaspersky is a partner-led vendor doing most of its business through a global partner channel. We work with a variety of partners that have diverse business models and processes. As a partner-focused company, we pay special attention to developing our partner network and do everything we can to make it profitable and convenient for our partners to do business with us. We have recently updated the Kaspersky United Partner Program to address Kaspersky partners at various levels according to their business model.
For this complex partnership structure, we have deployed a very tailored approach covering the needs and expectations of each type of partner. We have the Kaspersky United Partner Program. To make it easier for our partners to align their business with our solutions we have divided the partners into four business model-focused streams namely Sell, Deploy, Manage, and Build.
SELL partners are resellers, system integrators, and VARs, with their unique market position and customer access, have been the main drivers distributing and reselling Kaspersky technologies.
DEPLOY partner program helping VARs shift from selling vendor solutions to helping customers and partners resolve their challenges has been the cybersecurity trend. The Deploy partner program is designed to expand the network of expert partners who understand the company’s cybersecurity technologies and are capable of pre-selling, delivering a demo, and providing Proof-of-Concept to their customers.
MANAGE partner program is designed to develop and support Managed Service Providers. They are partners who deliver professional services and managed solutions through flexible consumption models. They provide build solutions based on Kaspersky services.
The BUILD partner program is designed directly for the growing number of Kaspersky’s Technology partners. This program allows Kaspersky’s Technology partners to enrich their offer with Kaspersky’s globally acknowledged expertise and/or reduce the time to market for the launch of their products and services. Kaspersky will assist its Build partners with product integration, provide access to Kaspersky R&D experts, may offer marketing support (on a case-by-case basis), among other benefits.
With the evolving threat of ransomware against the IT and OT systems in India, what best practices would Kaspersky recommend for stronger cybersecurity defenses through deploying threat intelligence capabilities?
Indian companies will continue to be under threat from ransomware in 2024 as well. The menace of ransomware is moving from version 2.0 to version 3.0. The threats are becoming more evolved, while in 2023 the attacks were more targeted with pressure tactics being used. The attacks included data encryption to publish confidential information in the event of non-payment of the ransom. This caused reputational damage for the organizations involved.
For 3 years in a row, file encryption has been the #1 problem faced by our customers. In ransomware 3.0, expect issues like triple extortion, DDoS, reselling of data, and a wider impact on the financial aspect and reputation of companies to take root. Ransomware threats will continue to become more sophisticated, so enterprises need to take a more mature security posture and device advanced strategy that combines the latest cyber security technologies, governance, and cyber immunity processes.
For Indian companies, cyber security in 2024 should be more evolved to include threat intelligence on the latest attacks and the adoption of advanced technologies and controls. The Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal is a single point of access for Kaspersky’s TI, providing cyberattack data and insights gathered by our team for over 26 years.
Kaspersky Industrial Cyber Security (KICS) is the platform that helps enterprises adopt a mature cybersecurity infrastructure. The KICS platform, with natively integrated products and services, has been designed to protect the OT (operational technology) layers of enterprises. Some of the elements include DCS, SCADA, HMI, controllers like PLCs, IEDs, Robotic Automation, OT Networking equipment, Gateways, and Operator and Engineering workstations. KICS platform
helps to pre-empt threats and vulnerabilities, enforce policies and controls that neutralize threats, respond quickly to threat incidents, and manage complex IT infrastructure from a security standpoint.
What are going to be Kaspersky’s key focus areas in the next 12-18 months?
At the beginning of the fiscal year, almost all large and medium enterprises in India plan their investments to upgrade their IT & OT systems. So, we plan to be part of that strategy discussion with our customers. With the threat landscape in India evolving and maturing, we plan to push Kaspersky’s comprehensive solutions including Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Services and Kaspersky Industrial Cyber Security solutions and services.
We also plan to strengthen our presence in the country through industry events, awareness programs, and innovative solution launches. Appoint new distributors to strengthen Kaspersky’s B2B, Managed Services Provider (MSP), and Managed Security Services Partner (MSSP) business in the market. Partnerships like these will aid in the expansion and growth of Kaspersky’s position in India’s enterprise market as well as strengthen the SMB segment. Lastly, we aim to work with leading educational institutions to jointly promote and foster the development of educational and research projects in the field of cybersecurity.
