Oracle plans to set up its firstThreat Research Lab in India

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi encouraging techies to make India the cybersecurity hub of the world, tech giant Oracle is now planning to set up its first threat research lab here.

“We intend to expand our threat research spectrum into a couple of other geographies with India very much in line for it. We’ve got a few hundred security professionals already working from an R&D standpoint on our products, and threat research is absolutely the next set of expansion that is on the forefront,” said Rohit Gupta, Global V-P, Cybersecurity, Oracle.

Gupta said that companies in India are finding it hard to recruit cyber security professionals, which is giving rise to a managed security services market, where companies such as Oracle offer security as a service to large enterprises.

Oracle is aggressively working in the Indian market to capture the growing demand in cyber security solutions.

“In the security space we are integrating with a variety of third-party security vendors in the security ecosystem. We integrate with products from NextGen firewall vendors. We integrate with products from endpoint security vendors such as Symantec and the McAfees of the world. We integrate with SIM, third-party security incident and event management systems such as ArcSight and IBM QRadar. And so, a fair amount of that work in terms of building this ecosystem of the best of breed solutions is actually being purpose-built in the Indian market itself,” said Gupta.

Cyber attacks rise

With the rise in digitisation in the country, India is also becoming a big target for cyber criminals. Over 22,000 Indian websites, including 114 government portals, were hacked between April 2017 and January 2018, Parliament was informed this week.

Moreover, with increasing cloud adoption, Indian enterprises are opening themselves up to another new threat vector.

“When everything was within your network and you were controlling it, you could homogenise the tech stack, you could have a limited number of operating systems, limited number of databases, limited number of network, routers. Now, when you go to the cloud, you don’t know what tech stacks there are, and depending on whether you know it is infrastructure as a service, platform as a service or software as a service, you could have a whole myriad of technology infrastructure, tech stacks that you are dealing with” said Gupta.

This adds up to the complexity in the enterprise networks and reduced visibility of what’s going on within the network.

“Customers look for a way to get their arms around this, they want better visibility, they want a better scrutiny in terms of what’s going on in the environment; they want a more streamlined and a more automated way of keeping up with some of the challenges that it brings. So, it’s a matter of balancing – what I call balancing the convenience of adopting SaaS applications with some of the challenges of the threats and the risks in the security landscape today,” said Gupta.

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