More awareness
Increasingly, employees are being required to work on the go, which means they need to have ready access to the Internet and the company's network. This is often where viruses and all sorts of external threats enter the network. “As enterprises open and extend their IT infrastructure to accommodate the demands from their employees, customers, suppliers and partners, threats and vulnerabilities increase exponentially. The Indian enter­prises have already realized this threat. Certainly the awareness regarding this threat has increased to a great extent,” said Rana Gupta, Director, India and SAARC, Safenet.

According to Sighat, the scope of online security awareness in India varies according to the size of an organization. “While most SMEs and enterprises have warmed up to the concept of investing in Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliances for safeguarding their business interests, many SOHO customers are still limited to desktop security products,” he said. This is where solution providers need to make inroads into this segment and create more awareness about endpoint security solutions.

Different businesses need different levels of security. Giving an example of the level of security required by different verticals, Sighat said, “The banking and finance sector in India, as of 2009, not only have stringent security measures in place, but also extended themselves to securing the customer. They are making efforts to create customer awareness against online identity thefts and data frauds-this happened due to a 30 percent rise in phishing attacks on major banks who took the threats seriously and immediately tightened their security belts. Each vertical while they would be aware of the need for online security, deploys the security that is necessary for their particular industry.

Vendors claim that this is one sector where they are seeing good growth. “In India, the demand for such products and solutions is on a rise. In the last few years we have been experiencing a healthy double digit growth in this product segment,” claimed Gupta. In fact, a fairly new player in the e-security space-ACPL Systems, has been seeing a growth in access of 70 percent YoY, which shows that customers in India are waking up to the fact that single security solutions will not keep their networks save.

Changing mindsets
Hard times call for drastic measures, but this does not mean at the cost of your customers business. It is a time when companies are pulling their purse strings and being cautious in their spending. The message that one needs to pass on is that opting for endpoint security solutions can eventually offer them good return on investment. “The biggest challenge is that often the customer treats this deployment as a cost. They feel that they can install any product and all their issues will come to an end. What they fail to realize is that they need to engage the experts who understand the security issues and have the capability to resolve them. Most final negotiations happen with the purchase departments and they end up buying inferior product from incompetent people,” averred Vishal Bindra, CEO, ACPL Systems.

Gupta opined that by educating customers about the latest in security arena, they will be able to differentiate between the most advanced technologies and their predecessor. Adding to that, Signat said, “Customers need to understand the motive behind network threats and embrace security solutions which can enable them to keep logs of user activities on the entire corporate network, thus, delivering comprehensive security.”

Securing a network is something that can not be put off for later, hence despite the recession and other factors that are having a dampening effect on the market, the sales of endpoint security solutions is still seeing a growth. “Customers have not stopped endpoint security deployments but we have witnessed a slowdown,” shared Bindra. Sighat added that most customers understand the need to protect their networks from external or internal attacks, and thus, treat investment in online security deployments as a necessary part of their business proposition.

Trends in this space
According to Sighat, two major trends in this segment are mobile environments in which endpoint devices function, and consequent information security risks posed by vulnerable endpoints. Also, regulatory and compliance measures are an important pre-condition to comprehensive security because modern enterprises have to follow statutory norms such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, GLBA, CIPA etc.

Also, users are adding additional features to their endpoint security such as device control, application control etc. A lot of bigger enterprise have also started to put endpoint encryption in place.

These clearly point to the fact that network security is catching up in India, and as more and more companies understand the importance of deploying endpoint security solutions, more opportunities will surface for solution providers.