It has truly become important for businesses to first acknowledge the risk of threats before embarking on any technological development. This is true even more for smaller business than larger established enterprise that will do it for compliance and regulatory requirements without a choice. It is not only about risk, but also building trust with their customers to show that they are taking security and security measures seriously and taking steps to address them proactively.

The underlying differentiator between new business and technological developments today is the speed with which business can take them to market and they must do this without compromising security. To align their initiatives and tech development, it is imperative now more than ever to make security a cost of doing business and for any initiative, and partner with experts to provide those services instead of doing it all themselves.

For those, who have kept security as priority are finding application security a complex problem and are struggling to comprehend it. It is giving rise to many questions in their mind such as where to start, which products to pick, how to build the expertise and ensure to stay protected. With the vision of enabling business to go digital fearlessly with their applications, Indusface was incepted.

Serving the Need

The current pandemic has caused a huge change in behaviour on how we approach work and digitization initiatives have been given a rocket fuel. It is needed for survival and being relevant even more now. This means more application, need for more online services and the security threats and need will increase.

Not everybody has the expertise to address security and hence partnering with vendors who not only provide the technology but also the expertise to manage it for the customers is going to be a pressing need as new SMB business start adopting digitization initiatives and will have a need for Managed Service even more than large enterprises. Indusface is serving well to this dire need.

Though in the short run there will be some pause in spending as the business themselves are going through tough times, in the long run, the COVID-19 pandemic led to more digitization initiatives and it will continue to stay even after normalcy is restored. This means the need for security will also increase in parallel. According to the core team of Indusface, cybersecurity market itself is going to expand a lot more than it was projected to be post this pandemic era.

The company has been mentioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Tech Now reports, is CERT-In empanelled as a trusted scanning vendor and has been the recipient of many awards such as the Economic Times Top 25, Nasscom DSCI Top Security Company of the year Award and is funded by Tata Capital Growth Fund.

Integrated Offerings

A SaaS company, Indusface secures critical web applications of 2000 plus global customers using its award winning platform that integrates web application scanner, web application firewall, DDOS/Bot Attack mitigation, CDN and threat information engine along with a 24×7 fully managed web application security service included in the offering.

Indusface’s WAS solution is a fully managed risk detection service that enables businesses to do on-demand unlimited automated security scanning of their web applications. It provides them instant visibility of their security risk and takes action.

As part of the same service in a premium business, can also request on demand manual penetration testing and business logic security checks to do deeper risk assessment. This is backed with a 24×7 support team to provide guidance, proof of concepts and evidence of the exploitable risks so that business can take quick action.

Secondly, its recently launched AppTrana solution is a fully managed risk based protection and web application firewall that includes the risk detection component and also managed web application firewall to instantly fix those vulnerabilities and mitigate risk backed with a 24×7 support team to provide unlimited updates to policies, custom rules. It is backed with a zero false positive guaranteed with SLA.

Confronting Challenges

Up to some extent, change has occurred as businesses are starting to realize the importance of security. Venkatesh Sundar, the Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Indusface, wishes to bring more changes in the cyber security arena.

While talking about more changes that are yet to be witnessed, Venkatesh asserts, “Security has become a concern and a boardroom discussion. There is no need to sell the need for security. However, the purchase behaviour is still based on risk mitigation and not productivity enhancement. Now that business has accepted the risk is real and will not go away, for any digitization initiatives the overall ecosystem can get better, and more secure if the business approach it as efficiency building.”

“By keeping away the attackers, breach attempts, the efficiency of the business improves as the application has to deal only with relevant payloads, logs, metrics and data. It is a shift in thinking and with this thinking, a business can focus more on the positive emotions and benefits and ROI metrics of efficiencies, productivity enhancements by embracing security initiatives as opposed to only the negative emotions of what could go wrong. Another thing I would change is in the ecosystem is more broad and at grassroot levels to make cybersecurity a more integral part of the education system to help develop better future leaders, and professionals and engineers with this skill set.”

Applying KIS

With respect to sustaining the differentiator, Indusface aims at applying the KIS Principle – Keeping it Simple. Its mission is to make it extremely easy to secure web applications for customers. Everything that it does within the company has to connect to this promise of helping customers stay secured without any effort or very minimal effort from customers’ side after they partner with the company.

Thus, its product development and priorities are always mapped to answering questions such as – Can it help detect risks better for customer with this initiative? Can it help protect against those risks better for customer with this initiative? And can it make simple for the customer (so simple that it just works, no matter how much backend complexities on product and process are built around it)? Indusface believes that as long as it does these three things consistently, persistently and builds the right talent to deliver on this, it will stay ahead of the market.

In upcoming years, the company sees itself securing a million plus web and applications and KIS for the customer and borrowing a note from Amazon way of working. The company will still consider itself to be in day zero even at that point of time as there would still be a few million more applications to secure using KIS principle.

Bequeathing the Keys to Success

As the wind of change in cyber security has arrived, many entrepreneurs are aspiring to venture into the cyber security industry. As with any business, commitment and challenges involved are very high, one must have the drive to see it through, believes Venkatesh. He advises those budding entrepreneurs to make sure the problem and need is identified and vetted with few businesses, and the market fit product is checked before building it.

He says, “The possibility of virality and new need being created (like tweeting and social networking) is unlikely for a b2b Cyber Security business. Like any business venture it starts with an idea and what you feel is an identification of a need by solving a problem but try to vet the product market fit before building the product is my key advise. Once the need is established also think what is unique about your offering besides just the idea to sustain the uniqueness and be better on a sustainable basis. It most likely will come down to do you have the unique talent with respect to product building, sales relationship and ability to sustain it on a ongoing basis as you embark on this journey.”

Exhibiting Quality

“The Risk Based Fully Managed Application Security technology offering from Indusface provided us the best value for money. We signed up with Indusface as not just a technology supplier, but as an application security partner for enabling us to drive more digitization initiatives.” – Kiran Belsekar, VP-Info security, Aegon Life

“Indusface has proved to be a valuable security partner with its Total Application Security solution. Their ‘detect-protect-monitor’ package handles security worries so we can focus on improving services for our customers. Vulnerability detection, attack blocking and near real-time reports are some of the key differentiators that we enjoy with them. The web application scanning and web protection combination has ensured that we are protected from highly increasing threat vectors.” – Sharad Sadadekar, CISO, HDFC Life

“As one of the leading banks in India, securing application infrastructure is critical for us. Indusface’s Total Application Security package allows us to scan vulnerabilities continuously and prevent attacks. Indusface also provides the unique benefits of expert handling and tuning on custom rules with round-the-clock traffic monitoring and protection through on-premise appliances.” – Deval Mazmudar, CISO, IndusInd Bank.

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