Rahul Kumar, Country Manager, India & SAARC, F-Secure, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights 2018 and opportunities for 2019
One of the key events of 2018 has been the continuation of supply chain attacks. Soon after the NotPetya attack in 2017, such attacks started becoming more diverse and this is expected to continue in 2019. Also, last year witnessed significant progress on the automation front. This development is making cyber attacks more unfeasible for cyber criminals by increasing the cost of conducting them.
Another substantial development of 2018 was the global debate around privacy. Considering that every business has to collaborate with third-party vendors on multiple levels, the debate has increased the interest around Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions. Digitisation is an ongoing process. More people are coming under the digital umbrella with every passing day. This is simultaneously enhancing the prospects for the IT channel industry as well as cybersecurity players. We are confident that 2019 is going to have some very positive developments in our battle against cybercrime.
Top tech trends for channel community
We are closely looking at Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a technology. This is because the threat landscape is transforming very rapidly. The increasing scale of attacks in the future will make remediation harder using the conventional approach. So, AI continues to remain a game-changer across cybersecurity applications.
The current trend in the field is shifting towards reinforcement learning which is advantageous in application fuzzing, password guessing, penetration testing, and so on. The global cybersecurity industry is also battling an acute talent shortage, which totals around three million according to the recent estimates. AI adoption is helping businesses to automate their detection and response with unparalleled precision, thereby enabling their talents to focus only on the critical areas and IT initiatives.
The Internet of Things (IoT) will continue its rapid pace of adoption. The technology is still in its relative infancy, so we are seeing solutions coming to market which are not considering security and privacy in the design stage. Until these become a priority feature, we can expect to see a slew of issues arising from these vulnerable products.
Channel directions for partners
Our channel strategy in India is value based and we are going after acquiring the right channel partners who can add value to the customer ecosystem and believe in services driven growth, which ties back in exceptionally well with our partner strategy. We would like to go ahead with this focus, as we are confident that it will lead to competence in the ecosystem, which will always drive revenue. We are committed to getting our partners to a level where they can drive value conversations in this market and be respected by the customer fraternity.
