Searching for goldmine in Smart Cities, Digital India and Enterprise Security

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With the sluggish information management business (Veritas) out of the way, Symantec aims to explore new avenues to revive floundering revenue growth of its core security business. In India, it is focusing on Enterprise Security, Smart Cities and Digital India.

Generally, government and enterprises have been little reluctant to adequately invest in cyber security because they have too many other projects to execute and cyber security does not become the priority. But now there is gradual shift, security is becoming more of high priority task as the growing trend of digitisation across emerging economies including India, using own devices by employees and occurrence of regular cyber breaches are posing critical challenge. So much so that in July 2015, China came up with a new law on national security, making cyber sovereignty as an integral part of national security. The security giants such as Symantec sees these developments as an opportunity as well as challenge.

To increase its core focus back to cyber security, the Mountain View, California headquarted company which acquired Veritas, a major player in the data backup and storage software markets, in 2005 for about $13 billion has decided to sell its for about $8 billion to a private equity investment firm, The Carlyle Group and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC. With this sale, Symantec is now keen to get back to what it does the best—managing cyber security. Company’s senior officials are now betting high on the emerging market such as India for growth. They see huge potential in government’s Digital India, Smart Cities projects and enterprise security segment in the country.

“Both from enterprise and government standpoint, cyber threats are on the rise. Country like India is actually in the top three target in the world. And, this is fueled by enterprise mobility and government’s digitisation programmes. Now, people are becoming more internet savvy but the internet penetration also works like a magnet for scammers. Although, there are lot of technology savvy people in India but it also has a very large non-technology savvy people who are keen to go on the internet. Hence, there is growing need to ensure cyber security,” senior vice president – enterprise product, Symantec, Amit Jasuja told EC

Across the globe there is gradual move to adopt cloud and mobile platform. Companies are moving their non-core data to cloud and going forward, the difference between on premise data and on cloud data will further go down. This is leading to newer avenues for security exploitation. To address the unique need of hybrid situation in which some data are on the premise and some are in the cloud, Symantec has reformulated its strategy and it is working towards an unified security strategy which aims to covers four key dimension of modern day cyber security challenges—threat protection, information protection, enhance security services and security analytics platform.

On the government front, Symantec is keen to be part of Digital India and Smart City initiatives. It is working with some of the local players, who are bidding for Smart City projects, to enable them on the design of the gateways for connected device in Smart City and help them solve some of the basic questions such as how the gateway will look like, how will it be secured and how will it authenticate devices.

Recently, the American technology company has also partnered with industry body NASSCOM to train over 50,000 cyber security professionals over the next few years. As part of this initiative, Symantec will facilitate internships and placement of certified candidates and support SSC NASSCOM in curriculum development for five job roles in line with the National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF) along with the master training program. It also intends to fund the scholarship for 1000 women undertaking cyber security certification by NASSCOM. “These initiatives are an attempt to bridge the cyber security workforce gap that exists in the country. It is an extension of the Symantec cyber career connection (SC3), a program launched last year to attract and train young adults and women in the field of cyber security,” said Jasuja.

Symantec has made large investment in India. It has five offices, over 4,000 employees, about 20% of its global workforces are spread across key cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and Pune. The security giant also has a key security intelligence installations like security response center in Pune and security operations center in Chennai, servicing global and local customers. Last year India was carved as a separate region in APJ. According to Jasuja, about 35% of Symantec’s engineering talent is based in India and one in five employee is in India.

To the question of why people would need Symantec at a time when companies such as Microsoft is bringing embedded security with products, he said, “large companies have been doing security since long time but with the evolution of cloud, smartphone and apps, there are different devices in an enterprise environment, hence company needs a unified security strategy and therefore security companies like Symantec are better placed to serve the enterprise goals.”

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