Cybersecurity threats move at a global scale, but the way they manifest in India and SAARC is shaped by local realities. In an exclusive conversation, Diwakar Dayal, MD & Area VP – India & SAARC, SentinelOne tells Bhavya Bagga, Business Reporter (Corporate & Leadership), CXO Media & APAC Media how SentinelOne has adapted in India with three priorities of localization of solutions, talent and ecosystem depth and market-specific engagement.
As MD & Area VP – India & SAARC at SentinelOne, how do you see AI and automation redefining cyber defense in the region, especially against advanced threats like deepfakes and GenAI-driven attacks?
The accelerating scale of cyber threats in India, where incidents can strike every 39 seconds calls for a fundamental shift beyond human-dependent, reactive security. The rise of AI-generated attacks, such as deepfakes, has made traditional defences obsolete. SentinelOne’s agentic AI and automation model is built specifically for this era, harnessing platforms like Purple AI to not only detect and triage sophisticated threats autonomously but also contain and remediate them in real time.
In a cybersecurity sector facing an acute skills shortage and rapid digital growth, automation and AI are no longer optional; it’s the only way businesses can build resilience and shrink response times from hours to minutes. This is already being realised by Indian organisations defending against financial fraud and ransomware, showcasing the need to move from reactive firefighting to proactive, AI-driven defence.
As enterprises in India & SAARC rapidly adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments, what unique security challenges are emerging, and how is SentinelOne addressing them?
With India’s enterprises accelerating their shift to hybrid cloud, with 54% of enterprises now using hybrid environments as of 2025 – the attack surface has expanded, leaving many vulnerable to misconfigurations, shadow IT, and lateral movement across complex digital estates. The stakes are high: India experienced over 369 million malware detections in 2024, averaging 702 threat detections per minute, underscoring the rapid escalation of cyber threats as more critical sectors embrace cloud and IoT.
SentinelOne’s unified Singularity Platform delivers granular visibility and AI-driven protection across endpoints, cloud workloads, and identities whether on-premises or in public clouds. Real-time threat detection and automated response capabilities remediate attacks before business impact. This approach addresses skills gaps by automating Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst tasks and arms SMEs and enterprises alike with advanced tools to secure the fast-digitising backbone of India’s economy.
As the regional leader, how are you aligning SentinelOne’s solutions with India’s evolving data protection and cybersecurity compliance landscape?
India’s regulatory landscape driven by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and sectoral mandates calls for localised data storage, strong audit trails, and fast breach notification. At SentinelOne, we prioritised this with strategic investments in in-country infrastructure, ensuring all logs and sensitive data remain within India’s borders for maximum compliance and sovereignty.
Our Singularity platform lets customers map data flows and automate regulatory reporting; a need specifically called out in my earlier interviews as essential for India’s digital empowerment. This approach has proven vital for fintechs, public sector units, and regulated service providers facing heightened scrutiny and reporting requirements.
How do you balance global cybersecurity strategies with the specific needs and challenges of India and SAARC markets?
Balancing global strategy with the needs of India and SAARC is less about compromise and more about orchestration. Cybersecurity threats move at a global scale, but the way they manifest in India and SAARC is shaped by local realities—regulation, digital adoption, infrastructure maturity, and talent readiness.
At SentinelOne, our global playbook gives us scale, consistency, and the advantage of innovation coming from Silicon Valley, Israel and other part of the world where SentinelOne is located. But for India and SAARC, we adapt it with three priorities:
- Localization of solutions: Many customers here still run hybrid or air-gapped environments, so we need to secure them without assuming they are fully cloud-native.
- Talent and ecosystem depth: India has an unmatched pool of security practitioners. Investing in local partnerships, skills, and support makes our global technology usable and trusted here.
- Market-specific engagement: Governments, critical infrastructure, and large enterprises in this region have different compliance and sovereignty expectations. Addressing those is as strategic as the technology itself.
Looking ahead, what is your vision for SentinelOne’s growth and leadership in the India & SAARC cybersecurity ecosystem over the next 3–5 years?
India’s digital economy is projected to reach 20% of GDP by 2026, with the cybersecurity sector expected to more than double before 2030.
Our vision for the next 3–5 years is to make SentinelOne the most trusted cybersecurity partner in India and SAARC—not just a technology vendor. The region is at an inflection point: digital adoption is surging, AI is reshaping both opportunity and threat, and cyber risk is now a boardroom agenda.
Looking ahead, SentinelOne aims to build India and SAARC into global exemplars for autonomous, AI-powered defence.
We see three pillars driving our leadership here:
- Deep market presence: Expanding our footprint across key sectors—financial services, critical infrastructure, government, and digital-native enterprises.
- AI-powered defense at scale: Leading the transition from reactive security to autonomous, predictive protection that helps customers stay ahead of machine-speed threats.
- Ecosystem leadership: Building strong local partnerships and investing in talent to ensure customers get global-class innovation with local execution and support.
In short, our goal is to help shape the region’s cyber resilience story. We’ve had years of consecutive years of growth here already, and we want to turn that momentum into long-term leadership by delivering outcomes that matter: stopping breaches, protecting trust, and enabling organizations to embrace digital growth with confidence.
