India is Building a Robust Local Cybersecurity Solutions Ecosystem: Rahi Systems

With the government promoting Indian cybersecurity companies and increasing demand for e-commerce portals, India is building a robust local cybersecurity solutions ecosystem shares Rohit Singal, VP – India, Rahi, in a brief interaction with Amit Singh. He also shared Rahi’s plans to expand into newer locations and acquire new customers

Give us a brief overview of Rahi and its journey so far.

Rahi was co-founded in 2012 by Sushil Goyal, Tarun Raisoni, and Rashi Mehta with a vision is to become a trusted source for the global delivery of IT solutions and services. We have developed end-to-end solutions that encompass our team’s significant capabilities to help customers maximize the value of their IT investments anywhere in the world.

Over a span of 10 years, Rahi has a presence in 6 continents, across 22 countries, and 32 cities with 1000+ customers.

Rahi is elevating digital transformation to create integrated IT environments and drive competitive advantages.  The company provides a full lifecycle of technology solutions, from assessment, architecture, design, implementation, and managed services, to professional services and support. Our logistics and distribution teams understand supply chain processes and still deliver engineering and support resources efficiently.

Cyber security has emerged as a major challenge for businesses, especially during the last two years of the pandemic. What is the adoption of advanced cyber security solutions by businesses in India?

India’s cyber security industry nearly doubled in size amid the pandemic, with revenues from cybersecurity products and services growing from $5.04 billion in 2019 to $9.85 billion in 2021, according to a report by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI). The pandemic has given a boost to the cybersecurity sector and helped enterprises accelerate their growth. Companies across sectors are now focusing on cybersecurity solutions as there is a greater chance of cyberattacks due to remote working environments. Companies are investing and deploying security solutions such as data security, workload security, threat management, endpoint security, and security analytics, followed by identity and access management.

 There is an increased push for digitization of operations in India and this resulted in an increase in consumption of cybersecurity products. With remote working being the new norm, companies are adopting cybersecurity products that can be deployed easily and are not very expensive. Organizations should think about moving towards a unified security suite of solutions within their security architecture that can protect their web, email, network, and endpoints. With an increasing demand for e-commerce portals, India is expected to develop local cybersecurity solutions. The government is also promoting Indian cybersecurity companies, providing funds for the development of cybersecurity infrastructure, and is working on a data privacy policy.

 How are IT leaders leveraging cloud-based solutions to prepare for unpredictable circumstances and instill agility and resilience in the organization?

Cloud plays an important role in elevating businesses as it is vital to modern technology infrastructures. One of the main reasons for deploying a cloud-based solution is to reduce cost through the saving of energy, decreasing staff to support the servers, and maintaining security. Cloud-based solutions are less expensive than using physical hardware and software. Many small and midsize businesses can’t afford the types of equipment required to process big data. Hence, they prefer a cloud provider on a subscription plan.

Cloud-based solutions enable faster disaster recovery of mission-critical applications without impacting your customers. With a well-designed disaster recovery plan in place, the impact will be less if a disaster hits. Organizations can outsource services like mail services and file or document management services to the cloud and this will reduce hardware and employee costs that are involved in maintaining these services.  By outsourcing application development and testing activities to the cloud, companies have been successful in delaying the upgradation of expensive hardware in their own data centers. The aim is to perform app development and testing on the cloud on-demand basis.

How is technology enabling enterprises to overcome challenges and deliver on customer experience?

The expectations of today’s customers are continuously evolving leading to enterprises moving above and beyond their traditional customer service methodologies. Technologies such as the cloud, for instance, are helping them to enhance customer experience. In fact, improving customer support or services is fueling the investment in cloud solutions.

Other technologies such as AI and ML are enabling organizations to engage in conversation with users in a humane manner. For example, chatbots today have been rapidly deployed by enterprises to respond to customer queries as well as fulfill the modern consumer demand for instant support.

What are the best practices you suggest in order to avoid data breaches and ensure cyber security?

While the pandemic led to a rise in cyberattacks, the delay in the implementation of technical and infrastructure changes in the post covid world has made organizations more prone to cyberattacks. As organizations will adopt the hybrid work culture, new security challenges will continue to emerge. Today, organizations need to refresh the cyber security approaches and technologies currently being deployed. Below are a few practices to avoid data breaches and ensure cyber security.

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) – Security has traditionally focused on the network perimeter and also the user, device, or application inside the secure perimeter is of trust. But this model isn’t effective within the remote and hybrid work models. The rapid adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and shadow IT applications have further complicated perimeter-based security in a very zero-trust approach, all users, devices, and applications aren’t of trust, to start with.

Software-Defined Perimeter: Virtual private networks (VPNs) have long been the answer to remote connectivity. However, they’re rigid in configuration and don’t seem to be flexible to support custom user policies. With the adoption of the cloud, it’s simply not feasible to provision and manage VPNs for each connection. Software-Defined Perimeter solutions grant users selective access to specific resources supported by device, location, time of day, and other variables.

Identity and Access Management (IAM): The perimeter constantly moves to support the situation of users and applications they access during a zero-trust model. Identity management is foundational to the present approach and this solution helps in managing user identities and credentials. It grants access and authentication to users and provides capabilities like single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and federated identity management.

Mobile Device Management: Mobile device management (MDM) is important to any security strategy within the era of BYOD and users performing on phones. Remote and mobile users are using their personal devices to access business-critical applications and data. The MDM solution should be compatible with the one-sign-on and multifactor authentication approaches and incorporate zero-trust principles.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR): Organizations must secure the endpoints themselves. Extended detection and response (EDR) solutions monitor endpoints for cyber-attacks and automatically take action to stop them. They use analytics to guard against advanced persistent threats and zero-day attacks.

Please talk about your focus areas and expansion plans over the next couple of years.

Rahi is planning to expand to newer locations and work with new customers. We plan to grow by around 30 percent in 2022. We have orders for huge data centers and other projects are in the pipeline. There are multiple projects for audio-visual requirements and we will be setting up a 30-conference room office in India before the end of 2022. Rahi has also introduced Cloud as a Platform (CaaP) and the team is rapidly adding clients to the portfolio.

Our recent expansion has been to New Zealand for offering services to existing customers and partners. Hiring plans include management trainees, new sales managers, and executives and adding more technical talent to the team almost every month. Rahi recently announced augmenting its workforce by 50 percent and hiring 500 employees by the end of 2022.