BANGALORE, INDIA: SonicWall started as a US-based company approximately 20 years ago, but it entered the India market only in 2005. Since then, the company has graduated from a mere firewall vendor to one of the few vendors to develop advance UTMs for enterprises. It has extended its offerings to provide  intelligent network security and data protection solutions.

In an interaction with CIOL, Shubhomoy Biswas, Country Director – India & SAARC, talks about the new trends in security adoption, his company's offerings to both SMB and enterprise segments and the threats the organizations need to watch out for.

Q: In the changed security landscape how do you see enterprises gearing up for security challenges?

Shubhomoy Biswas: Medium scale businesses have been front runners in adopting UTM solutions.  All these years, the big enterprises were content with firewall and anti-virus at their end points because even the fastest UTMs came with some imitations.

However, I see all this changing ever since SonicWall introduced its UTM with unique scanning technology. Conventional UTMs had a hard disk through which packets moved. Our appliance does not have a hard disk and every packet coming  through our appliance is scanned. So the packets move at a more sustained speed. This is called Deep packet inspection.

SonicWall is also one of the very few companies to have a multi-core architecture. There is more than one CPU in our appliance and each CPU is designed to do different things. So, everything becomes faster. These technologies have helped SonicWall to come out with faster products and a lot of enterprises have started adopting our UTM solutions.

The `super massive' UTM launched recently is the fastest in the world.

Q: Any specific threats that you think enterprises should watch out for?

Shubhomoy Biswas: It's difficult to predict an exact type of new threats. That is why security companies spend so much time on launching new security signatures.  New threats are associated with technologies taking over the world. 

SSLVPN is one such technology which allows access to your corporate server from anywhere and from any device. Earlier, it was desktops and now it's iPhones, BlackBerries or any mobile. So the threat can now come from anywhere. That's why there is an increase in threats.

The worst threat that can cause a lot of damage is Spyware. When Facebook gets defaced it can be shut down and rectified. You may reactivate it but still you can rectify the damage. But in case of Spyware you won't know if it is there, while it could be eating out all your information.

Spyware attacks may increase over the years. Earlier it used to penetrate into a network by a desktop or an internal hacker, but now it can come from anywhere. Every day, devices are increasing. So the threat landscape is quite alarming. But what is happening now is for every technology to address an issue, there is another tech that increases the threat.

Q: There is a lot of hype about Cloud and its acceptance. What kind of challenges has this brought to an  UTM vendor like you?

Shubhomoy Biswas: With cloud there are two things to be kept in mind. Whether you have an an in-house application or in the cloud one needs to have security. Applications can be there in the cloud but a CTO would always want users to go through him.

That's why our next-Gen firewall gives visibility to a CTO or network administrators on what's happening in the cloud infrastructure. And the next-Gen firewall will continue to evolve with cloud.

There are certain applications that come under security cover and which will work from Cloud. Classical example of this is email security.

Q: What is your assessment of enterprise security market? What are the opportunities available for a new entrant like SonicWall?

Shubhomoy Biswas: To be frank there are very few players in enterprise segment. Today, enterprises are dependent on vendors who can be finger counted. It is natural for enterprises to look for alternatives. In fact, across the world, enterprises are looking for alternatives. Every enterprise renews its security once in 1-3 years and it is also true that no security is a perpetual buy.

Q: SonicWall is shifting its focus towards enterprises too. How strong is your SMB offering?

Shubhomoy Biswas: SonicWall is helping SMBs with a whole range of solutions. We are helping them to secure data communications and protect online transactions by offering robust and affordable solutions. Our products offer enterprise-class security at an SMB price.

Further, we are offering SMBs a range of solutions like layered network security, secure remote access, remote support and remote PC access, Web and email security and also continuous data protection support.

Q: SonicWall now has changed its business plans. What are the new targets?

Shubhomoy Biswas: Last year, we were not selling for large enterprises. Now with the new offerings we have entire top enterprises on our list. So we are aiming at 40 per cent growth. The security industry is growing at 19-20 per cent rate annually. But we hope to achieve 40 per cent growth.