BANGALORE, INDIA: According to the AMI annual SMB survey, some of the major drivers for investing in a security solution is the need for protection form threats, occurrence of frequent data loss and increased awareness of security products.  Abilash B.D., analyst at AMI Partners, tells us more about data security among Indian SMBs. Excerpts:

CIOL: In your view, how secure is the SMB data?
Abilash: The Indian small and medium business (SMB) segment can be ranked as the most vulnerable in terms of security. Security infrastructure in small businesses is limited mainly to the deployment of anti-virus solutions and they lack proper security management.

CIOL: What are the major security issues that SMBs are facing today?
Abilash: More than half of India’s medium businesses experienced electronic attacks and hard drive failures during 2008, emphasizing the need for better security protection.

CIOL: How liberal are SMBs in their IT spend?
Abilash: Small and medium business has reached a stage to justify the kind of investments they have to do in setting up a robust security infrastructure. Even though there will be a deduction on annual IT spending due to current economic constraints, it won’t affect the security spending.

According to the AMI annual SMB survey, some of the major drivers for investing in a security solution is the need for protection form threats, occurrence of frequent data loss and increased awareness of security products. Past three years have witnessed a surge in security infrastructure deployment. Indian SMBs have become increasingly aware of their security vulnerabilities, which when exploited by viruses and hackers via the Internet, results in lost income as well as lost time and data. Almost all SMBs invested in security solutions over past year.

CIOL: What are the prevailing trends in the security solutions sector, with regard to SMBs?
Abilash: Both small and medium businesses are interested in reducing the number of different security products and brands they use – this has led to the popularity of integrated security suites which bundle multiple products such as anti-virus, anti-spam, email protection, firewall etc. in one packaged offering. This triggers the need for security solutions like unified threat management (UTM).

Most of the security vendors who were mainly focused on serving enterprise segment have shifted their focus to SMBs. The challenge for these vendors will be fine tuning their products to cater the needs of SMBs and devising an efficient channel strategy to increase the penetration.