Cyber security firm SonicWall is betting big on India as the company revealed that India is its fastest growing region for two consecutive years.
“We have two large R&D centres — one is in Silicon Valley and the other in Bengaluru,” said Ravi Chopra, Senior VP and CFO of SonicWall. The company plans to grow its manpower in India by 20 per cent by the end of this year.
Business growth
SonicWall currently employs 200 R&D professionals in Bengaluru and around 150 for customer support and sales, a sizeable chunk of the 1,400-strong manpower of the company. Chopra also said that apart from R&D, SonicWall is also investing significantly in sales in India as business here is growing robustly.
“For every next dollar that I spend, I think 70 per cent of that dollar is going to India and 30 per cent elsewhere. Our rate of growth is going to compound based on that,” Chopra stated.
But Chopra also stressed that the rate of growth of digitisation in India is far ahead of sufficient growth in cyber security investment. “It is taking a while for people to realise that it is a big threat,” he said, adding that another concern was the lack of skilled professionals for companies to hire or whether they are able to afford them.
However, Chopra claimed that in India, a lot of start-ups and medium-sized businesses are buying firewalls. Apart from this, he also claimed that companies are interested in the entire portfolio of cyber security services — WiFi security, e-mail security and endpoint security.
“In India, a lot of people are buying mid-range firewalls. All of them are buying (them) with our advanced security services software,” Chopra said.
AI monitoring
SonicWall is also using Artificial Intelligence to predict and flag malware. Incoming data is analysed and suspicious data is flagged and sent to the cloud.
Sand-boxing is then used to figure out whether it is malware. “If it is indeed malware and if you are one of the first computers to get hit with that, that information will then be sent to all the firewalls so everyone is protected,” said Chopra.