Gajshield Strengthens Presence in Smaller Cities with Value-Added Partners | Sonit Jain

While highlighting recent company achievements, Sonit Jain, CEO, GajShield Infotech in a brief interaction with Amit Singh, Content Head, Techplus Media Group shares that the company is aligning with value-added regional partners to reach out to Class B and Class C cities and to every nook and corner of India..

Covid-19 caused the relocation of employees from office to home – expanding the attack surface. How do you think the new normal changed the cyber strategies of companies across the country?

The challenge with that is, it really opened a lot of security challenges, especially for security managers. This really meant not only that they must take care of what was the earlier infrastructure was within the enterprise but now they must also look at infrastructure, which is now outside the enterprise, and very little control over that. And that really caused a lot of pain for cybersecurity managers. They really had to redesign the way the security was handled earlier. So consequently, most security teams have had to rapidly reprioritize their roadmaps and investments. And because of this massively disrupted their whole plan programs of work. And in, believe me, the pandemic has reinforced the critical need for security programs that are agile enough to react to these extraneous shocks.

As the threat landscape is evolving, there is a recognized need to move beyond the traditional measures of security. What are your suggestions and tips to help CISOs in optimizing their security and follow in combat with next-gen cybercriminals?

As we move towards the new normal, I would recommend that all risk managers look at the new challenges which have come in because of remote working. People working from home, users working from home, the kind of vulnerabilities are there because now no longer you can trust. Now, business leaders have done their job, their priority during the COVID was business continuity. So, in this uncertain time, that is very important that CISOs also speak to business leaders and understand what the risk proposition are and what is the risk involvement that should be really done with all stakeholders. Look at the new norm, look at data, look at where it is residing, and work around data security, rather than looking at the old norm, having the perimeter or in the cloud or. All your security must be around your data, wherever it is decided,

Organizations can streamline and improve security models by incorporating Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning algorithms. According to you, what are the possible challenges in the implementation of such security models?

Now, security leaders in enterprise really must look at how AI could be worked in the behavioral modeling, that is one thing that I would say, and specifically the anomalous behavior, or to improve existing detection capabilities, and especially in user behavior, and that is one very important aspect that we believe that AI would be used in identifying how does a user behave under normal times. Are there any anomalies, detect these anomalies, and then raise flags immediately, so that security personnel can investigate it and identify if there are any threats within and outside an organization. So, AI can definitely prove to be a boon to detect attacks. Also, they must ensure that the models and the data that they are using to train the models are not compromised by threat actors and on which will make life easy for the straight threat actors to penetrate your security.

How does GajShield bring value to the overall security strategy of organizations? How do you differentiate from the competition?

We suggest enterprises that don’t just look at network security, don’t look at perimeter security, don’t look at endpoint security, or even look at cloud security. What is the most important aspect within the organization is your data, and that is the new oil that everybody acknowledges the value that it has, and the value data has within an enterprise. That is what enterprises have to protect at any cost. In GujShield, we strongly believe that organization should relook and move data to the center of all their security decision making so that they can build a very robust data security environment.

So, with our data security firewall, that we launched just last year, we bring the data first approach to security, which understands data, provides deeper data level visibility, and also allows to control the data threat surface, taking appropriate security measures to prevent data exploitation. We are going one step beyond just not to a zero trust network security or endpoint security, but we are saying look at data, and recall all your strategies around data security, and that is what our product helps enterprise to do, to bring that kind of data visibility, the threat plane, the vulnerabilities that are there on the data, and help them to secure irrespective of whether users are within the enterprise or outside.

Please talk about your recent business achievements in terms of business expansion, revenue growth and customer acquisition over the last 12-18 months.

This year we have seen 200-250 percent growth from our previous year. So, it’s been phenomenal growth for us. Along with India, we are well placed in other continents and countries like the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, and even Northern America. In our focus in each of these countries is to understand the data centric risk concerns of enterprises, their local laws, their compliance, and work with channels. We are now ICSA lab certified for the last 15-16 years. In India, we had had very strong key customer acquisition across sectors, it’s just not one particular sector well across sectors, whether you look at the government sector, you look at education, you will look at enterprises, whether its large or small to medium enterprises, and even across different verticals.

Please talk about your channel footprint and your plans for channel expansion.

Channel partners are a big backbone of our sales strategy that goes without saying. We always have believed that success does depend on the channel partner success, and that we can accomplish more by working together. And our study in our channel partner strategy is based on three clear key pillars, ensuring that their business growth is aligned with us, ensuring that enabling their sales and technical resources skill set to be industry ready, and supporting them in their innovation journey towards new technology. Also, to support our channel partner ecosystem, we have signed up with SI Infonet, as a value-added distributor, to drive the SMB mid-market and the government business.

Any specific plans for channel expansion, any number that you would like to place that these many other targeted additions that you’re looking at over a certain period of time?

We are well placed in all the major metros, and very well placed in many of the class B cities. Our strategy over the next year is to grow in the smaller cities and reach out to every nook and corner of the country. We are also working with couple of value-added regional partners, who have a very strong reach in each of the cities, whether it’s Class B, or class C, and can handhold channels, and their customers to implement a technical solution like security.

What is your outlook for the security industry over the next couple of years?

We see a very strong cybersecurity market in India growing at a very fast pace. I believe it is approximately about $10 billion already in India. But believe me, it’s growing at a very fast pace and, and what is fueling this is that enterprises have adopted cloud and have moved their application to the Cloud. We also looking at regulations like the data privacy law, which will further fuel the market in India once it is enacted, and where we will see that there would be some kind of impact on all kinds of enterprises handling consumer data. So, that tool will help to grow the cybersecurity market in India. The Indian security space will see launching of new startups. There’s a huge potential of growth in the cybersecurity industry for Indian company especially.