Earlier, Network Security was known to be a concern only for the IT and Banking industry, has now penetrated into every vertical as a serious threat to any business or organization. Awareness and preparedness of these cyber risks have become a priority for consumers, suppliers and manufacturers. While every sector is fast embracing the ‘Internet of things’, they are forced to challenge the existence of cyber threats, risks and malwares; there is thus an increase in focus among regulators.
Security has become a major point of discussion throughout the entire IT landscape in recent years, as high-profile breaches have impacted popular brands with vast resources, proving any business can fall to cybercriminals. Organizations today cannot approach security on their own. There are too many data endpoints to shore up and too many threats to defend against. Cybercriminals are constantly changing their methods, so it is crucial that firms keep up at all times.
Earlier, Network Security was known to be a concern only for the IT and Banking industry, has now penetrated into every vertical as a serious threat to any business or organization. Awareness and preparedness of these cyber risks have become a priority for consumers, suppliers and manufacturers. While every sector is fast embracing the ‘Internet of things’, they are forced to challenge the existence of cyber threats, risks and malwares; there is thus an increase in focus among regulators.
In the past, India has been targeted through cyber-attacks primarily for political reasons and trends show that this landscape seems to only gain prominence with the availability of more sophisticated technology and more complex transactions increasing vulnerability of systems. The market that is driven by varied forces like the rise of analytics of big data, consistent rise in threats, fall in the availability of customer security software and strong regulatory compliances enforced by the Government, has few, yet giant hurdles to cross, namely, technical expertise and lack of awareness of security concerns.
The Market can be segmented on the basis of Segment (Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Security Web Gateway (SWG), Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and Enterprise Content-aware data loss prevention (DLP)), Solution (Encryption, Firewall, Web Filtering, Identity and Access Management (IAM), Data Loss Protection (DLP), Risk and Compliance Management etc.), Service(Network Security, Endpoint Security, Application Security, Content Security, Wireless Security and Cloud Security) and Verticals. The technology is widely being used to protect violation in Aerospace and Defense, Banking and Financial Services, Telecom and IT, Healthcare, Retails, Manufacturing, Government and Public Utilities.
The market shows promise in the Cloud-based hybrid security, Mobile security, and Bring your own device (BYOD) technology. The current demand for integrated security solutions is also an aspect that is widely getting attention today.
Current Scenario
With a strong digital push in India, the country is in the midst of modernizing the way it conducts business. Demonetisation has also driven the nation to conduct financial transactions in a cashless manner. New bank accounts are being opened at an unprecedented rate, e-payment services are seeing rapid growth, and online businesses enable people to order almost anything online. As businesses embrace digital technologies, they have also become mindful of the cybersecurity risks associated with any digital ecosystem. Companies have been investing more on network security to safeguard online services, the wealth of data they keep, and in compliance to regulatory requirements as well.
“We’ve just released Palo Alto Networks State of Cybersecurity in Asia-Pacific report, which revealed that cybersecurity budgets for 92 percent of organisations in India have increased in the past financial year. It’s evident that businesses are now acknowledging the importance of ensuring business continuity amidst the persistence and growing sophistication of cyber threats. As we continue to see rapid adoption of cloud technologies and connected devices across all industry segments we anticipate demand for effective network security offerings to rise at a sustained rate,” said, Riyaz Tambe, Head – Systems Engineering, India and SAARC, Palo Alto Networks.
“The attack surface for cyber threats is ever expanding and the increase in targeted and organised attacks is impacting the way businesses approach security. Moreover, digital advancements like cloud, IoT and BYOD is throwing open a new set of issues for businesses to tackle. As technologies advance and more number of devices get connected to the internet, bigger the need for IT security products. And as networks become more complicated, IT departments are becoming more concerned with how they can effectively secure data. They can no longer simply protect the network perimeter and call their network secure. The perimeter of networks continues to expand—to include the cloud, mobile devices and a new generation of virtual road warriors—authenticating users exclusively through a network gateway is no longer enough to keep your network protected. Simple and comprehensive security is mission critical. Synchronized security strategy which allows endpoint and network security products to directly share threat intelligence to more effectively protect against today’s sophisticated threats should be the way forward, “opined, Sunil Sharma, senior director sales, Sophos India & SAARC.
“With the increasing growth of data theft, money extortion online and other computer crimes, both small and medium enterprises and large scale enterprises in India, especially those in the financial services and banking sector, have begun to realize the importance of network security systems and have increased their investment in network security. The network security landscape in India is expected to grow by 50% in the coming two years as reported by KPMG, with the small and medium businesses showing a positive growth trend in the coming years. Financial services and banking and technology information, communication and entertainment are the sectors showing a positive growth trend in the network security industry of India. As more and more small and large companies adopting new technologies like 4G, WiMax, Cloud, SDN and software as a service model and becoming compliance ready. The investment on network security has been getting more momentum and it is expected to grow bigger,” opined, Manab Mallick, Technical Head, (India & SAARC) Netgear Technologies.
“The Indian network security market grew by 8.9% YoY in 2016 with a total market size of $ 289.2 million according to Frost & Sullivan. The market growth was driven mostly by the service provider vertical which contributes the biggest chunk to the Indian network security market. The key highlights of 2016 was the steady increase in spending on network security by the Government (11.1% growth) and Education (12.4% growth). The initiatives like Digital India will continue to generate a steady demand for network security infrastructure among others,” said, Jitendra Ghughal, Director Channels, India & SAARC, Fortinet.
“Businesses around the world are changing rapidly. The last decade has seen disruptive technologies in social, mobility, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) and security remains an area of concern for all of them. According to Gartner, Security spending will continue to grow in 2017 when revenue is projected to reach $1.24 billion. Security services (that includes consulting, implementation, support and managed security services) revenue accounted for 61 percent of this total revenue in 2015, and this proportion will increase to 66 percent by 2020,” concluded, Anshuman Singh, Senior Director Product Management, Application Security, Barracuda Networks.
Drivers and Challenges to the growth of Network Security in India
“With business dependence on IT growing by the day, the pressure to process more data and support more devices has become higher than ever before. Critical data that used to be housed in a secured datacenter now moves across an increasingly complex ecosystem of networked environments, including IoT, cloud, mobile devices and workers, and virtualized networks. The rate of change in some environments is so rapid that many organizations simply can’t keep up. A recent Forrester survey of 342 security leaders found that the largest cybersecurity challenge for CISOs is adapting to “the rapidly evolving nature of cyber threats.” This is followed by the need to secure cloud workloads and services, and having to manage and secure their increasingly complex IT environment,” said, Ghughal of Fortinet.
“The number of cyber threats and Cyberattacks targeting organizations won’t slow down anytime soon. In recent months, we’ve seen increasingly sophisticated attacks targeting specific organizations, compromised IoT devices used in DDoS attacks, and large-scale ransomware outbreaks spreading across the globe. India Inc has become increasingly aware of the risks of cyber attacks that can bring even the biggest companies to their knees. Today cyber security is a top priority for every business as they continue to embrace and transact in an online world,” he added further.
“Cyber threats are constantly evolving, which requires that consumers be especially vigilant in preventing such attacks. Poly-morphic attacks continue to be highly effective as they have for many years. In that respect, it is highly difficult to predict what the next type of attack will be. What is more important is to have the right type of defences in place to deal with them effectively as they happen. This requires that customers protect themselves from all threats across all threat vectors. Ransomware and Phishing attacks across the world are also on the rise. Security analysts predict an average of 200 new variants of Ransomware per quarter with no signs of slowing well into 2023. According to the latest APWG report, the total number of phishing attacks in 2016 was 1,220,523, a 65% increase over 2015. Cybercriminals are increasingly using ransomware to attack Indian firms and entities. India ranks amongst the Top 5 countries in terms of ransomware attacks. The number could be much higher as many organizations do not come out in the open fearing loss of trust amongst clients and loss of future business. This increase in security attacks has led to the demand of robust security products/infrastructure,” said, Singh of Barracuda Networks.
“Network security consists of products and services used to monitor and secure network and databases, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data and securing all sensitive information from hackers. The Network Security Market consists of hardware and software performing security functionality that includes mainly firewalls, VPNs, intrusion prevention and detection, and multi-purpose security known as unified threat management. APAC market is the fastest growing region with India witnessing a very high growth rate compared to other Asian countries,” said, Mallick of Netgear Technologies.
“The growing need to achieve agility, operational efficiency, and automate is all key driver to the growth of network security in India. Businesses are moving towards a hybrid model where some workloads still remain as part of physical infrastructure, while a considerable amount of workload is also moving to either private or public cloud environments. We see all types of customer segments currently adopting the hybrid model. Some are quite mature on their journey towards this model, while some are still gradually getting there. Security is an important ingredient for hybrid architectures. Automation and orchestration are key to effectively protect these dynamic environments. Traditional security was static in nature and to cater to the current threat landscape, security needs to be dynamic. Palo Alto Networks allows customers to provision and automate security across their hybrid environments enabling them to be more agile to take care of their security needs,” said, Tambe of Palo Alto Networks.
“In terms of challenges, the same State of Cybersecurity in Asia-Pacific report by Palo Alto Networks revealed that the three major cybersecurity challenges organisations in India face are employees’ lack of cybersecurity awareness (47 per cent), risk from third-party services (43 per cent) and migration to cloud (35 per cent). Awareness is slowly increasing but skills gap is a global issue and not just limited to India. Skills required to take care of current cybersecurity needs are limited and is one of the biggest challenges. Also according to the survey, organisations predominantly adopt basic security measures. Respondents indicated the highest adoption rates for antivirus (77 per cent) and firewall (74 per cent), whereas anti-ransomware (37 per cent), two-factor authentication (35 per cent) and biometrics (46 per cent) have fallen on the lower end of the spectrum,” Tambe further added.
Deployment of SDN Security
A big shift is happening in the way the world is designing data centres. It is all about agility and speed to programmatically deliver an entire application environment in minutes instead of weeks, and efficiency to reduce costs and automate on the fly, changes, without human intervention. Security has to be baked in, to make such software defined trends more secure. Security is an essential enabler of this change.
“In the world of Software-defined data center (SDDC) and Software-defined networking (SDN), the main motive is to provide agility and efficiency, having security built into these types of architecture helps optimise ROI. Traditionally, to take care of security even in a virtualised data centre, traffic had to be steered to the physical security infrastructure. This had a considerable amount of cost implication and defeated the purpose of Software defined Architectures. To take care of security in software defined architecture, security had to be integrated to allow Data Centres and networks to be more agile. Thus, Software-defined security is more commercially and operationally viable. Palo Alto Networks provides security controls for hybrid environments which could include private and public clouds and some portions of the physical infrastructure. By providing consistent, advanced security across the entire deployment we help enable customers to optimise their investments,” said, Tambe of Palo Alto Networks.
“IT organizations have gained significant benefits as a direct result of server virtualization. Server consolidation reduces physical complexity, increases operational efficiency, and provides the ability to dynamically re-purpose underlying resources to quickly and optimally meet the needs of increasingly dynamic business applications. These are just a handful of the gains that have already been realized. This transformation started a decade ago with x86 hypervisors delivering greater IT efficiency through server virtualization. But as cloud computing drove further evolution of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with greater agility and elasticity, those concepts have spilled over to network virtualization and SDN, as well as into Software-Defined Storage, Software-Defined WAN, etc,” said, Ghughal of Fortinet.
“Network security is also being impacted. Firewalls, intrusion prevention, and other security appliances have traditionally been deployed as hardware devices at discrete points in the physical network, such as the ingress/egress point at the network edge. But as security needs to increasingly be deployed throughout the network to counter advanced threats inside the perimeter, there are challenges maintaining visibility and control with dynamic and logical network flows in increasingly software defined environments. With the profound and fundamental changes to data center infrastructure, constricting traffic through a few fixed static inspection points would negate many of the benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service agility,” he added further.
“Software defined networking (SDN) would centralize and simplify control of enterprise network management. The specific advantages of software defined networking are traffic programmability, greater agility, the ability to create policy driven network supervision, and implementing network automation. The promise of SDN is the ability to allow networks to keep pace with the speed of change. NETGEAR M4300 Switch Series is also ready for the future, with Software-defined Network (SDN) and OpenFlow 1.3 enabled for your network. Even if an organization is not ready for SDN, OpenFlow support offers future-ready design for maximum investment protection,” said, Mallick of Netgear Technologies.
Future hold for Network Security
“There are three irreversible trends that are driving the security industry in the country: Globalisation, Digitisation and Mobility – with the internet as the common link among all the three trends. Today, the internet has become the business enabler but at the same time, is the most unsecure tool mankind has in its hand. Now for the concept of a ‘smart nation’ to be fully attained, “digital” and “safer” must become synonymous with each other. There will always be a strong need to make the digital ecosystem safer, hence we find it important for businesses to adopt a prevention-minded approach to cybersecurity rather than reactive. Most of the time, responding to breaches after the incident is a little too late,” said, Tambe of Palo Alto Networks.
“Before we understand its future, understanding its challenges is equally important. The predominant market challenges for the Network Security Market in India are implementation challenges due to complex network. Economic and budget constraints resulting in lower adoption. Bundling of security with network infrastructure results in lower revenues; over the last one and half decades, disruptive technologies in social, mobility, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) have emerged. Enterprises are leveraging on these to extract benefits on cost, efficiency, and value. While all of these are sweet spots for businesses, security remains an area of concern for all of them. Frequent Cyber attacks on government bodies and large enterprises to increase demand for network security product. Securing the network of the enterprise continues to remain the basic cyber security arrangement in protecting digital assets. Netgear offers wide range of products catering to SMBs and enterprise and bets on high growth,” said, Mallick of Netgear Technologies.
“We are seeing escalating data and traffic volumes, cloud applications and services, expanding numbers of mobile devices, and IoT all converging on the network. Data and traffic from endpoint applications and IoT devices are overwhelming data centers. Networks are adopting public and private cloud solutions. Perimeters are disappearing. Shadow IT is on the rise. The use of encrypted data is on the rise. And mobile users are increasingly reliant on smart devices that are simultaneously converging and distributing their private and work lives. And at the same time, security breaches, data theft, and increasingly sophisticated malware attacks are more prevalent, and cost organizations more money than ever before. In this scenario, Cyber Security has become a priority for every business,” said, Ghughal of Fortinet.
“Today’s point products and platform security solutions simply aren’t capable of providing the solution breadth, processing performance, or advanced automation necessary to address these demands. It’s clear that traditional approaches to security are quickly becoming unsustainable. The Fortinet Security Fabric delivers the broad, powerful, and automated security solutions needed to solve today’s challenges while laying the foundation for the self-sufficient, Intent-Based Network Security that will be critical to protect tomorrow’s enterprises,” Ghughal added further.
“We recently expanded the Email Security Suite, and launched Barracuda Sentinel, a new AI solution that prevents spear phishing and cyber fraud in real time. Barracuda Sentinel that combines powerful artificial intelligence technology, domain fraud protection using DMARC authentication, and fraud simulation training into a comprehensive solution that guards against spear phishing, impersonation attempts, business email compromise (BEC), and cyber fraud. Barracuda Sentinel is delivered as a cloud service, without any hardware or software to install or maintain. Barracuda Sentinel works alongside existing email security solutions, including native Microsoft Office 365, Barracuda Essentials, or others—and is available today for Microsoft Office 365 users worldwide. We also recently expanded Cloud Ready program to offer organizations a free cloud license for Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Barracuda NextGen Firewall on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for 90 days. Barracuda’s cloud-enabled security suite allows customers to deploy their applications and workloads securely with the same powerful capabilities and intuitive user interfaces whether deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Barracuda offers a variety of flexible pricing options, including bring-your-own-license, pay-as-you-go, and metered billing,” said, Singh of Barracuda Networks.
“We introduced two new MSP professional services offerings to complement the MSP editions of the Barracuda NextGen Firewall and the Barracuda Backup Appliance. These new services offer 24/7/365 monitoring and management, enabling MSPs to offer security and data protection to customers, while freeing up and supplementing their MSP team. We have also been recognized with numerous awards and accolades for technology innovation, channel commitment, and customer service – 2017 Redmond Channel Partner Editor’s Choice Award for Best Security Product for Barracuda NextGen Firewall for Azure; SC Magazine 5-Star Review in the Ransomware Group Test for Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection; Channel Partner Program of the Year and Editor’s Choice Vendor Award in the 2017 Storage Awards; 2017 CRN 5-Star Partner Program Achievement for both channel/VAR and MSP partner programs; Best Customer Service in 2017 SC Awards Europe,” he added further.
Differentiating Factors
“Barracuda is focused on bringing powerful, innovative solutions that fortify the security fabric across public, private and hybrid cloud deployments and can be centrally managed from a single pane of glass – at an affordable price point. Barracuda’s vision is to empower customers with solutions that make IT simple, secure and affordable,” said, Singh of Barracuda Networks.
“Since its founding, Fortinet has challenged the traditional concepts of network security with a focus on engineering innovative cybersecurity solutions with the breadth to cover an organization’s entire attack surface, the performance needed to handle the massive amounts of data traversing enterprise networks, and the automation required to rapidly respond to threats. One year ago, Fortinet forever changed the way enterprises look at cybersecurity with its Security Fabric vision to deliver a holistic and adaptive architecture capable of defending the entire infrastructure, so they can best compete in the rapidly evolving digital economy. Fortinet’s FortiGate enterprise firewalls are central to the Fortinet Security Fabric – engineered to unify and automate multi-layered response to threats in addition to delivering superior Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) capabilities. In order to deliver a truly integrated Security Fabric, Fortinet developed its universal security operating system, invested in the development of sophisticated security processors, provided Security Fabric APIs to integrate third-party security solutions, and built the largest cyber threat intelligence infrastructure on the planet. The combination of these innovations enables Fortinet to deliver an integrated security ecosystem that ties together security at the perimeter, in the data center, on the campus, in the cloud, across internal segments, at branch offices, and spanning IoT and end user devices,” said, Ghughal of Fortinet.
“Palo Alto Networks offers the Next-Generation Security Platform and addresses cybersecurity challenges by delivering rich context from multiple points across all IT environments. We provide consistent levels of visibility, management and security controls from the network to the data centre irrespective of the data location whether in the private or public cloud, or within SaaS applications. We deliver the visibility, orchestration, integration, performance and threat prevention to establish a consistent security posture across the architecture, balanced with the freedom of choice in their cloud deployment models,” said, Tambe of Palo Alto Networks.
“The NETGEAR M4300 Stackable Switch Series delivers L2/L3/L4 and IPv4/ IPv6 cost-effective services for mid-enterprise edge with full PoE+ and SMB core deployments with unrivalled ease of use: 10 Gigabit models can seamlessly stack with 1 Gigabit models within the series, enabling spine and leaf line-rate stacking topologies. Non-stop forwarding (NSF) virtual chassis architectures provide advanced High Availability (HA) with hitless failover across the stack. Dual redundant, modular power supplies equipping full width models contribute to business continuity management. Layer 3 feature set includes static, dynamic and policy-based routing – as standard. Perfect for wireless access, unified communications and IP video, the NETGEAR M4300 Switch Series is also ready for the future, with Software-defined Network (SDN) and OpenFlow 1.3 enabled for your network. NETGEAR Intelligent Edge Switch solutions combine the latest advances in hardware and software engineering for higher flexibility, lower complexity and stronger investment protection, at a high-value price point,” said, Mallick of Netgear Technologies.
Finally
The network security market has grown manifold over the past few years. This is due to certain industry dynamics accelerating the growth of the market as well as the broader information security market. The foremost trend in network security involves enterprises of all sizes actively exploring the IT-as-a-service consumption model. Organizations today feel that procuring, deploying and managing technologies, hardware, software, updates and upgrades while maintaining skills and resources are tedious processes that require a lot of time and effort.
Highlights
“The attack surface for cyber threats is ever expanding and the increase in targeted and organised attacks is impacting the way businesses approach security. Moreover, digital advancements like cloud, IoT and BYOD is throwing open a new set of issues for businesses to tackle. As technologies advance and more number of devices get connected to the internet, bigger the need for IT security products. And as networks become more complicated, IT departments are becoming more concerned with how they can effectively secure data. They can no longer simply protect the network perimeter and call their network secure. “
“Security is an important ingredient for hybrid architectures. Automation and orchestration are key to effectively protect these dynamic environments. Traditional security was static in nature and to cater to the current threat landscape, security needs to be dynamic. Palo Alto Networks allows customers to provision and automate security across their hybrid environments enabling them to be more agile to take care of their security needs.”
“Software defined networking (SDN) would centralize and simplify control of enterprise network management. The specific advantages of software defined networking are traffic programmability, greater agility, the ability to create policy driven network supervision, and implementing network automation. The promise of SDN is the ability to allow networks to keep pace with the speed of change.”
“Since its founding, Fortinet has challenged the traditional concepts of network security with a focus on engineering innovative cybersecurity solutions with the breadth to cover an organization’s entire attack surface, the performance needed to handle the massive amounts of data traversing enterprise networks, and the automation required to rapidly respond to threats.”
“Barracuda is focused on bringing powerful, innovative solutions that fortify the security fabric across public, private and hybrid cloud deployments and can be centrally managed from a single pane of glass – at an affordable price point. Barracuda’s vision is to empower customers with solutions that make IT simple, secure and affordable.”
