It’s Time to Make Cybersecurity Available for Everyone
By Pankit Desai and Anand Naik, Sequretek Inc.
How does one divide society? By creating barriers. In the old days, language was a powerful barrier, Latin in Europe or Sanskrit in India was considered the language of the clergy, keeping the proletariat out. Times may have changed, but barriers haven’t, whether financial, educational, or access to technology.
Digital transformation is impacting all industries with varying degrees of adoption; it’s essential not only to survive but to thrive.Bankers have been vocal about increasing digital spend, a recent survey (communitybank.org) of community banks and credit unions has over 70% of them looking to increase investment in new technologies to remain competitive, attract and retain customers. The same survey also identified that CEOs are worried about cybersecurity risk (ahead of even liquidity and credit) and increased compliance costs (OCC), and therein lies the rub.
The combination of an increasing digital footprint leads to higher cyber risk, and the resulting compliance intervention is a vicious cycle that keeps banking CEOs up at night. Speak to any CEO, and you will hear the familiar frustration that despite spending significant money on complicated three-letter acronym products, they still don’t get an answer to a simple question, “Am I secure?”
As technologies transform, they go from niche and complex to simple and commoditized, and in the process, become widely accessible. Cybersecurity seems to be going the other way with 100+ different technologies from over 20,000 companies to choose from, making it one of the most complicated technology segments. This complexity creates a barrier that most enterprises find very hard to breach and has led to significant barriers requiring consultants and advisors to step in to help make sense of complicated technologies.
Nowhere is this divide more visible than in small and medium-sized banks, their cybersecurity risks are no different than their bigger cousins but, more often than not, lack resources to address them. Not all is lost, though. What smaller organizations miss in resources they make up in nimbleness and leadership. The one area where the leadership can swiftly and effectively step in is cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is where CEOs can take control of their strategy. The journey begins with the understanding impact of cybersecurity on four critical organization pillars:
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Brand
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Business Continuity
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Compliance
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Assets
Once the impact on critical pillars is known, it is essential to ask a few questions.
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Do you know your critical assets?
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Where are they located?
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How are they secured today?
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What is a potential threat?
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Who has access to them?
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Do you have a business continuity plan?
It’s quite evident from the questions, barring the last two, that these are best answered by business leaders instead of technologists. Technologists generally lack the business context and, therefore, make decisions that may not be optimal for the organization. A recent report by FireEye suggested that 35% of the company’s security products have overlapping features, and 80% of the products are misconfigured. The report highlights the problem statement that we started with earlier, where complexity creates barriers for active cybersecurity posture.
With this background in mind, we launched Sequretek in 2013 with a mission “to empower your growth without fear as your trusted partner, by simplifying security.” The operative words being “growth without fear” – as organizations embrace digital transformation, we want to be their partner who can mitigate their security fears.
This mission for us translates into offerings that increase coverage and reduce complexity. Our endpoint security product (EDPR) and access governance product (IGA) built using machine learning algorithms, with the ability to detect most sophisticated threats while giving the most straightforward tools to manage it.
For those customers who may not have the resources to identify and respond to threats, our 24×7 cloud-based security monitoring capability (MDR) offers a complete package that defends, manages, and monitors security across the organization, a de-facto one neck to choke. Between these three offerings, we reduce the number of technologies from over twelve to three, making it easier for organizations to dramatically improve their risk posture.
This approach to simplifying security and consolidating landscape goes a long way in making it accessible and affordable for our customers and democratizes it, which is something we need now today more than ever.
Today Sequretek has a team of over 350 cyber security professionals of which, over 150 are product developers and malware researchers. It is on the back of this amazing team that we have been able to build world-class security solutions for over 80 customers across US, Europe and India. The company has been growing at a CAGR of 50% over the past five years, we are looking to better the growth this year despite tough market conditions.