“Be safe while online”, Mr Govind Rammurthy CEO & founder– eScan (Interview)

“Take defensive actions before threats take actions on you“. Even after so many technological advancements, we are still at its periphery; a lot needs to be explored. Human minds have a great potential to create new horizons in technology that will help the people to live like Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. However, just like the story of Adam, the technology has demons too in the form of hackers, malware etc. And to mitigate these demons, the security industries always act like a GOD, and one of them is eScan.

“eScan” is a veteran player in providing security solutions to both consumers and enterprises. The company has more than two decades of experience in securing the IT infrastructures form a different kind of malware and cybersecurity threats.  Presently, it works in 12 countries through its offices and subsidiaries with help of robust channel partner network of more than 50,000 partners spread across 190 countries worldwide.

To understand how they work and what is the condition cyber security market in India, we had an interaction with Mr Govind Rammurthy CEO & founder of eScan.

Mr Govind Rammurthy set up MicroWorld in the year 1993 with a team of 3 engineers and started indigenously developing Anti-Virus and Content Security solutions. And within a short span, he has transformed MicroWorld
into a global company with a large partner network spread across the world. Today, as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Mr Rammurthy takes a hands-on approach in managing day-to-day affairs of the Company
and is also responsible for the technical aspect of the business.

1. Please let us know a little bit about eScan’s journey in the Indian market so far?

eScan being an independent vendor of security solutions has an array of solutions to protect the networks and endpoints of very large Enterprises to small businesses users.

Our strong R&D capabilities have resulted in technologies like Terminal Services Protection Module (TSPM), MicroWorld Winsock Layer (MWL), Proactive Behavioral Analysis Engine (PBAE), Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS), Domain & IP Reputation Check and Non-Intrusive Learning Pattern (NILP) Technology.

eScan’s EPP and EMM solutions are an integral part of eScan’s array of products, with MDM and Hybrid Network Support, and so are eScan Corporate 360, eScan Endpoint Security and eScan Enterprise 360. Furthermore, the new Unified eScan Management Console (EMC) module includes a Secure Web Interface that facilitates dynamic security management of the server, endpoints and mobile devices in the corporate network. Our R&D team works relentlessly to stay ahead of various cyber-attacks and provide a safe and secure environment for our valued users.

2. As compared to other countries, how is India’s security market different?

According to reports, India ranked in one of the top 3 lists of countries facing most cyber threats. Over the last few years with the advancement of technology, the growth of cyber-attacks has escalated multiple folds. Be it the attack on large corporate houses or Government office both companies and customers were at the receiving end. While the customers lost their personal information to the outer world, the companies had to compromise on their reputation. Cybersecurity is an ecosystem where laws, organizations, skills, cooperation and technical implementation need to be in harmony to be most effective. Cybersecurity is becoming more and more relevant in the minds of countries’ decision-makers owing to government initiatives like Digital India & Make in India. Growth in the market is expected to be driven by rising number of government initiatives towards digitizing government sector entities and processes, healthcare, banking and financial services industry, education and other vital sectors of the country.

3. Free Antivirus solutions offering to consumers by different companies are growing day by day. What is your take on this? Would this affect eScan or other paid AV businesses in future?

Free antivirus solutions have always been a constant offering, alongside commercial solutions. But, most free solutions have limited features and limited support. This differentiating factor is what makes a consumer pay for an Anti-Virus solution.  Hence, the answer to your question would be, it will marginally affect AV businesses in the future. But, paid solutions will still rule the roost.

4. How has enterprise security changed in the last few years?

One of the key concerns of CIOs today is the layered defence they need to build apart from safeguarding the data leakages.  It requires a multi-pronged approach to defend as well as find the breaches in time to mitigate them. The key concern remains to find the weak links quickly and patch them. As data centers and cloud technologies enable companies to seamlessly migrate between technologies as well as reduce cost, the acceptance levels for data centres and cloud solutions are fast becoming the trend. eScan has developed security solutions precisely for this kind of scenarios, where our users are alerted when a breach happened, apart from multi-layered security to protect the networks, endpoints and secured the data.

5. If I am not wrong, being a Veteran AV solution provider, still, eScan has not been enjoying the market share benefits in India as few of its stalwarts doing. How will this situation be handled by eScan?

With over 2 decades of pure-play IT security solution provider, eScan is well poised among its global peers owing to our strong R&D team. We as the security solution developers have been continuously building and strengthening our technology that use the latest Artificial Intelligence to IoT based specific solutions to be ready for the next wave of change in IT adoption. With our prolific R&D processes, today eScan is chosen as the preferred security partners by enterprises for its agility to provide customizable security solutions for small to large enterprises.

6. 2018 has ended and 2019 is still welcoming us. So, what are the trends or transitions we would get to see or experience in the security industry?

The rise of ransomware and Crypto-Currency has been the hallmark of the year 2018.  Continuing into 2019, these will still remain the most spoken about threats. Crypto-mining payloads coming in from the cloud and holding control of your CPU in order to mine for currencies will be one of the biggest threats we will see in 2019.

Apart from the above, customers getting on to cloud services and security-as-a-service offering will also see a big rise in this year.

7. Any new product or service announcement which the eScan users could expect in 2019?

As said before being one of the pure-play IT security provider, we work continuously towards a safer IT environment for businesses to individuals. Our R&D teams work relentlessly to develop solutions that are easy to use as well as ready to mitigate any security risk arising emerging sophistication of the attacks. We invest our significant time in staying ahead of the technology changes and trends to provide real-time security solutions for our customers stay safe from any kind of cyber threats. Be it the emerging threats involving IoTs or sophisticated malware attacks such as ransomware, our team have stood guard with solutions.

8. What should enterprises CTOs see before regarding any security solution? For example, Enterprise AV

 One of the weakest links in the growing digital transformation is people or users. Most of the malware outbreaks are due to poor knowledge of user towards security or being not aware on the precautions to be taken to stay safe. Having said that, a large challenge remains at the deployment level, where adequate security measures are not implemented or IT systems are not updated in time. To overcome such challenges, eScan has made its products and solutions designed in such a way that with minimalistic human intervention cyber threats can be contained and outbreaks can be prevented. This includes proactive patch management updates/alerts to group wise rules and policies deployment with a central web-based management control to track and mitigate any untoward incident such as ransomware attacks to APTs or targeted attacks.

9. What is the role play of India’s government in strengthening the cyber security?

The government initiatives like Digital India and Make in India have encouraged businesses and large enterprises to adopt the latest technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to name a few. The recent stories around privacy concerns will make data protection solutions more demand-driven for both new and legacy data consolidation. Given the boost by the government to promote digital payments, the growing technology will re-invent commerce. These will open doors to newer business engagement models through connected devices with the potential to disrupt payments.

10.The user behaviour of using Piracy products is also proliferating? What is your opinion on this? How will it affect the company’s business and user’s security?

As a matter of fact, piracy is reducing to a large extent in the software industry, especially when it comes to security.  Software prices have been constantly falling & major vendors have adapted to the service-model offering, which further reduces piracy, across the board.

11. What are the unique attributes of eScan which make it different from the rest of the AV technologies?

 To overcome the challenges of Businesses and individuals and to defend the cyber threats, eScan has made its products and solutions designed in such a way that there are minimalistic human intervention and cyber outbreaks can be prevented. This includes critical patch management updates/alerts to group-wise rules and policies deployment with a central web-based management console to track and mitigate any untoward incident such as ransomware attacks to APTs or targeted attacks. With our strong R&D capabilities, we have incorporated technologies like Terminal Services Protection Module (TSPM), MicroWorld Winsock Layer (MWL), Proactive Behavioral Analysis Engine (PBAE), Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS), Domain & IP Reputation Check and Non-Intrusive Learning Pattern (NILP) Technology to provide real-time protection against Ransomware, DDoS, APT and other cyber-attacks.