SMEs most lucrative targets for cyber attackers: Seclore Technology

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Saurabh Gupta | 25 Sep, 2017
The Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Seclore Technology, Abhijit Tannu said that the Small enterprises stand to lose the most due to cyber attacks and its eventual fallouts. A large portion of their funds is diverted towards driving business growth and maintaining operations, leaving little to no capital for cyber security spends. "Their low level security is why SME businesses are one of the most lucrative targets for cyber attackers," Tannu told SME Times in an email interview.

Excerpts of the interview...

Please tell something about your group - Seclore.
Abhijit Tannu: Incepted in 2008, Seclore is one of the pioneers of EDRM solutions which came into being as a university project in IIT Bombay. Today, Seclore enjoys a global presence in 30 countries and has offices in 8 key geographies including Mumbai, Dubai, New Delhi, New York, and San Francisco, catering to its 6.5 million active users. The platform’s innovation-driven and customer-centric approach has earned it multiple awards and recognitions from leading global entities including Gartner, Deloitte, TiE, and Frost & Sullivan.

What are the products and services you offer?
Abhijit Tannu: Seclore’s data-centric EDRM solutions include granular access and usage policies that predetermine location of access, time of access, and the device used to access the data. It, moreover, defines specific functions that can be executed on a file including data editing, copying, screen capturing, and printing. Our solutions can be integrated with enterprise applications such as ECM, DMS, ERP, and transactional systems in order to ensure secure file distribution within and beyond the network. It also enables a company to make quick audits and gain insights with regards to unauthorised file access, and dispose critical data irrespective of its location through a centralised control. Further, an enterprise can configure a specified duration for data usage and set up an expiry date for its critical data beforehand.

In short, Seclore offers complete control to enterprises with regards to their information, prevents data leakages, and addresses compliance by securing and auditing data wherever it travels.

Why Seclore? What is the USP of your products?
Abhijit Tannu: When people talk about information security, they are largely discussing how to protect the network perimeter. But with networks expanding exponentially, information security challenges are becoming increasingly complex with mounting concerns about malicious insiders and unsecured end-point devices. Every cyber security expert is well-aware that no matter how secure a network is, it can and will eventually be breached. What’s even more important for organisations to consider here is that their business partners or service vendors might not share similar concerns with regards to data security, which makes any in-house security initiatives completely redundant. In such a dynamic network arrangement, protecting data seems to be impossible using the tradition network-based approach.

The biggest USP of Seclore’s EDRM solutions is that it not only provides end-to-end data-centric security to the information irrespective of its location, but also grants complete visibility and control to the original stakeholder about the travelling data and its access. If the information is no longer required or if it compromises the company’s position, the program also extends centralised control to the original stakeholder, making it possible to destroy the information.

Seclore, moreover, leverages pre-built connectors and Policy Federation, which enables it to automatically protect more files faster than anyone. The biggest value that we bring to the table is that we work closely with our clients, irrespective of their size and scale, and try to understand their precise requirements. This personalised approach provides us deep industry-centric insights and first-hand experiences, which in turn lead to rapid product enhancement and seamless implementation. Our differentiated approach provides persistent data-centric protection and plugs information security gaps, and is also the reason why we are the most integrated and adopted EDRM solution in the world.

Why small entrepreneurs need an Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM) solution?
Abhijit Tannu: Small enterprises stand to lose the most due to cyber attacks and its eventual fallouts. A large portion of their funds is diverted towards driving business growth and maintaining operations, leaving little to no capital for cyber security spends. Their low level security is why SME businesses are one of the most lucrative targets for cyber attackers. Also, due to their relatively smaller size, critical functions - including payroll processing, accounting, customer support, and other vital business processes - are outsourced. This makes them more vulnerable to data leakages. EDRM solution instantly relieves them of all of these worries.

According to our experience, SMEs do not take EDRM solutions as a digital rights management product. Rather, they treat it as their end-to-end data security. Instead of going through multiple levels of network security, EDRM provides them holistic data protection and makes it possible to achieve their target of information security. Moreover, since it is a cloud-based service, it extends a plug-and-play experience to small businesses and ensures quick deployment to meet their requirement of velocity in operations.

What you have for Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs)?
Abhijit Tannu: Our entire array of ERDM solutions is available to Indian SMEs. We work closely with prospective clients to identify their specific information security requirements and deploy solution which are most suited to their business needs.

How you analyze the current cyber security scenario in India?
Abhijit Tannu: With proliferation of digital services and subsequent technological adoption, emerging businesses are banking on technology to serve as a prime differentiator in the market. But digital technologies come with their own unique set of challenges. We've lately seen some really sophisticated data breaches, including evolved ransomware attacks, cyber espionages, and malware injections, which are becoming more advanced with every day that passes. All of these attacks have exploited existing vulnerabilities within the digital architecture.

India, at present, is experiencing unprecedented digitisation. This also makes the country a soft target of global cyberattackers. Businesses are taking special measures to ensure that they secure their digital perimeter, but the degree of awareness and urgency that’s essential to counter the security challenges, however, cannot be said up to the mark. We are trying to change this dynamic in favour of Indian businesses though our innovative ERDM solutions.

What is Ransomware? And how SMEs can protect themselves from ransomware?
Abhijit Tannu: Ransomwares are malicious programs which lock down a system and demand a ransom for its decryption. Since such attacks are growing in terms of scope and extent, SMEs must take special measures to make sure that such programs do not enter their network. The network must restrict access to unauthorised and contagious websites. Also, there should always be a backup for critical information so that a subsequent attack does not stall the ongoing processes. Most importantly, however, SMEs must ensure that their critical business data is safe and secure. This can be done by deploying end-to-end ERDM solutions such as Seclore for data security.

Government of India is focusing on Digital India. What is your take on 'Digital India'?
Abhijit Tannu: A large part of India, especially in the rural geographies, is still not connected to the internet, which is a really big challenge given the rising global digitisation. It is good to see that the government is trying to solve this problem through various programmes and initiative. The Digital India initiative, in particular, has the potential to become a platform that catalyses the country’s growth and extends the benefits of digital services to every Indian citizen.

Any new global trends that you see would pick up in the coming days in India?
Abhijit Tannu: With burgeoning IT requirements, we will see a growing preference for cloud-based and over-the-top services as compared to custom-built software suites. Also, as India becomes more interconnected, we will see bolder steps towards e-governance to facilitate a much higher degree of information transparency within the country.

Is there anything new about Seclore that you would like to share here?
Abhijit Tannu: We are working on more seamless integration of our EDRM solutions with wide-ranging processes as well as data formats to extend an evolved customer experience.

What are your future plans?
Abhijit Tannu: Our future plans include making the technology more mainstream and addressing sector-specific concerns. We want to target and address problem areas, which have remained out of bounds for the traditional information security domain, through innovative security products.