BANGALORE, INDIA: Small and medium businesses (SMBs), basically, are cost conscious. And, in this present market environment, they are even more cost conscious. While many realize the benefits of investment in the right IT infrastructure, some hold back. Some SMBs are very creative and try to do more with less.

However, when talking of the challenges and pain points faced by SMBs, how can we leave behind the data security issues?

"When it comes to data security, deploying IT solutions and securing the same is a serious issue for SMBs. They continue to seriously view the reasons which are causing the threat with respect to IT in their business – be it business productivity issues or issues due to lack of visibility. Such things are based on lack of control and visibility in any business location. It can be theft or it can be pilferage," says Shekar G. Nair, MD and CEO, Elina Networks.

"Data is actually quite insecure in the SMB segment. The way people have been trying to solve the data security is by trying to keep the data very local. But keeping the data local is not viable to their business model, especially as the businesses are trying to scale across multiple geographies," he adds.

"In the last few months, there have been many businesses which are trying to expand rapidly in terms of different geographies and different business areas. Doing this, and adding to the fact that businesses have to interact with many parties including the suppliers, retailers etc, the need for information to be passed around is very high," he notes.

Adding further, Nair says, "Unfortunately, when you have to pass around the information you have to have your own private network on which the information is passed around. This helps in keeping your data secure. You also have to have some means of security not only in the network but also at the endpoint. One should also make sure that there is security at the local location where these information get transferred."

However, now SMBs have started realizing the fact that securing their data over the network, and locally, is very important, says Nair.

Highlighting the benefits Elina's solutions for SMBs with regard to efficiency and security, he says, "At Elina, our solutions actually focus on addressing the specific pain points of our customers in a very creative and cost-effective way. The cost, space, power and security aspects cannot be delivered by other solutions as most of them will be looking at it in a different manner not tailoring to the needs of SMBs."

According to him, Elina's consolidation of multiple point solutions provide an extremely good savings for the customers in terms of space and it is very cost effective for the SMBs as they have to spend on only one solution.

"How we have been able to achieve this compared to our competitors is that we have focused more on the featured requirements which suits only SMBs. We are trying to do more with less," he explains. "Our software solution can do a lot more with less numbers of hardware. One of our mantras is we tell our SMBs 'you will get a much better cost performance provided you are ready to spend less on hardware'."

Elina provides a very flexible model for the SMB data security. "We can provide them end-point security – which is a means to secure anything that comes into their branch location or any other locations. In some cases, the customer would not need an end-point security but would say it should be able to secure his PCs and any traffic that goes through should be secured. Here, we provide technologies like VPN," he informs.