Digital armour. To thwart cyberattacks, enterprises must have visibility of their assets: Sophos CEO

Cybersecurity has become so complex. It moves so fast that most organisations can’t manage it effectively on their own. The number of attacks is growing and the attacks are getting more sophisticated. Ransomware continues to be a global epidemic.

While organisations are buying products and tools, they are overwhelmed by their sheer complexity and high cost. They’re hard to manage. If you really want to manage cybersecurity effectively, you can’t just rely on products alone. It’s got to be a combination of products and comprehensive threat intelligence.

There’s a global shortage of cybersecurity talent. A study says there are about 3.5 million open positions in cybersecurity. Cybersecurity professionals are very difficult to hire, retain and train. 

Because of recent advances in technologies like artificial intelligence and cloud computing, automation, and sharing of threat intelligence, we can offer cybersecurity-as-a-service at scale.

Besides taking information from all our products, across endpoint, network and cloud, and email, we can now take information from other vendors’ products as well. 

Yes. Ransomware continues to wreak havoc and become more prevalent. It’s successful because it works. Cybercriminals are either exfiltrating the data or making it public to demand ransom from organisations. To combat ransomware, it’s not just enough for organistions to acquire better protection. They should also have better detection and response capabilities.

Attackers can find a way to bypass even the best protection. A combination of people processes and technology is so important because it helps leverage cloud-based databases, artificial intelligence, and advanced detection techniques across multiple organisations.

Companies with deep pockets can purchase the right products and can have the scale, expertise, and budget to implement mature processes. But only a few thousand organisations have this luxury.

Small, micro and mid-sized enterprises, which make up the majority of the 30 to 50 million organiations in the world, face the same cybersecurity threats but lack the resources to tackle them.

This is why, we think, cybersecurity-as-a-service is so crucial. Because we can offer them access to the same scale, expertise and advanced tools and technologies, all packed as a service irrespective of their size.

We have a revenue of over $1 billion. We have a global workforce of about 4,500 employees. Of them, 1,000 employees are in India.

India is a strategic pillar of our business. It is the largest single country in terms of staff for us, across all functions, ranging from R&D, finance, marketing, support, sales and back office. It’s one of our fastest-growing countries.

We work with various organisations, both in India and globally, to provide training and opportunities for new graduates, whether they come from technical schools or support training institutions. We have large support and engineering teams as well as management trainee and internship programmes.

To help organisations address the skills shortages, we offer cybersecurity-as-a-service so that they can rely on us instead of hiring security professionals.

About seven years ago, we had only a few hundred people. Today, we have well over 1,000. We would continue to grow and expand in India. 

I think that there are a lot of common attributes. Most cybercriminals, particularly when they’re operating at scale, tend to operate across States, and they don’t really respect national boundaries.

When they find a technique that works, they often deploy it very broadly. That’s one of the reasons that you see many of the same kinds of attacks or the same kinds of concerns across geographies.

When we take up surveys, we find that organisations in different geographies have similar concerns, budgets, staff, and confidence levels when it comes to cybersecurity. Organisations openly admit to struggling to keep up, and that they are overwhelmed.

Our first recommendation is to make cybersecurity a priority. It’s not something that you can check a box and get rid of. It’s something that you need to make an ongoing priority.

Secondly, enterprises should focus on the basics. Do you have visibility into all the assets on your network? Do you have modern, updated fully patched software on all those systems? Are you training your people on good online practices? 

Finally, are you deploying a cybersecurity strategy that has defence in depth where you’re relying on advanced technologies at multiple layers?