With India having become a vital market for Trend Micro, the company’s group CFO Mahendra Negi reckons that the country’s contribution to the IT security major’s overall revenue will be a significant percentage, buoyed by the accelerated growth over the last few years. Negi was in the country recently for the company’s annual Channel Partner Day.
According to the Trend Micro group CFO, in 2018, the company witnessed robust growth across its enterprise business in India. Currently, it has a dominant market share in the local banking sector, with many customers adopting its hybrid cloud security solutions for server and datacentre protection. Its customers in India include the top five IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) companies; the top seven energy companies; and all three private telcos.
Speaking about the company’s long-term commitment to the India market, Negi said, “India is an up-and-coming market for us, and presents a huge and strategic opportunity for our business. The key investment for us right now is in training our people; that’s why we have launched the new certification-granting programme in IT security (CPITS) in India.”
There is a big technology shift under way, according to Negi. “Cloud infrastructure continues to evolve and security in the hybrid cloud environment is getting a lot of attention from our customers. We also see strong demand for endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR) in India. We have invested heavily in all these areas,” he added.
Sharing security advice with enterprises in India which are transitioning to the cloud and adopting next-gen technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, and 5G, he said, “Don’t just tick the security box to fulfill compliance requirements. While compliance is part and parcel of a holistic cybersecurity strategy, the driver for security should center around risk assessment—figuring out what are the intangible assets of a company and how to protect them.”
A leading player in hybrid cloud security, Trend Micro is able to provide protection throughout a company’s cloud journey, from on-premise servers, virtual servers to cloud workloads. In 2018, the company launched a new solution for containers— the next big trend in application development in the cloud era. Currently, it observes strong uptake of private cloud from the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector; and that of public cloud from the manufacturing, e-commerce, IT and ITeS sectors, and born-in-the-cloud businesses.
The focus areas for Trend Micro in India this year include Apex One for advanced endpoint security, hybrid cloud security, network defense, and connected threat defense—Trend Micro’s approach to providing enhanced visibility across the entire IT environment. New local customer acquisitions from 2017 to 2018 include State Bank of India, BHEL, Syndicate Bank, Lupin Pharma, Bandhan Bank, PolicyBazaar, and Capillary Technologies, to name a few.
