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Software/IT Services/Business Process Outsourcing
The Mid-Market/Security Nexus
Competition has intensified in the storage and security space, whether from Microsoft, Trend Micro,
and McAfee, or from Indian providers such as former Satyam subsidiary Sify Ltd. A particularly
important nexus is developing in the mid-market segment where companies are looking for scalable
storage and backup solutions that will help them grow. As they do, they are open to security attacks
through the most vulnerable point of contact, the “endpoint infrastructure”—a customer’s, vendor’s
or employee’s computer that may have both business and personal uses.
Symantec managing director Vishal Dhupar told the Economic Times in 2006 that 86% of automated
network attacks in 2006 were against home users in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. As
broadband usage in India has grown, an estimated 59% of Indian home PC users share music and
video, play games online and visit social networking sites. These same computers may be also be
used in an office: In 2006, more than one in six Indian companies experienced a security breach
aimed at extortion, fraud, or intellectual property theft, most often through various endpoints.
That, in turn, has potential implications for domestic and offshore firms outsourcing from all but
the largest Indian IT services vendors.
Attacks include data theft and manipulation, disruption of business critical services, and damage to
company brand and reputation. These attacks have become increasingly sophisticated, commercially
focused, and multi-staged, initiated by corrupting or duplicating trusted sites of a targeted end
user. A Symantec study released in March 2008 said that the number of distinct, monthly “phishing”
attacks on Indian banks—fraudulent emails and website links aimed at soliciting personal
identification and financial information—grew from 20 in October 2007 to 120 in January 2008
alone. Each potentially reached tens or hundreds of thousands of bank customers.
In April 2007, Symantec opened a Centre of Innovation in Chennai that now employs some 200
staff, making India its second largest engineering site, behind the U.S. (Other global centers include
Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, Poland, the UK and Belgium.) The center is a focal point for
Symantec Research Labs (SRL) and Advanced Concept Group (ACG) projects in India. Chennai
also provides backup redundancy for Symantec India operations and helps broaden the talent pool
from which the company has been hiring. Within its Pune facility, whose workforce is currently
about 2,500, Symantec has set up a Global Security Response (GSR) lab that gathers security threat
information from some 40,000 third-party “sensors” in 180 countries, analyzes threats and the code
running them, and develops signatures to protect clients worldwide.
Symantec executive vice president and chief technology officer Mark Bregman says mid-sized
businesses will be an important market in India itself for integrated security solutions:
Any large enterprise today is already all over security. In the consumer market
there’s some awareness and it’s growing. In the mid-market, which is subject to
all of the same risks, they need security but don’t always know they need it.
What we’re seeing is a consumerization of the enterprise, where consumers
want to use their systems to communicate with the enterprise’s back end and we
don’t know what’s on their computers. At the same time you have employees
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