Zakir Hussain, Director, BD Soft India, shares the company’s distribution expansion plans and cyber security trends in India
How has been the journey of BD Soft in the India market so far?
Started in June 2016, BD Soft has been growing steadily in the India market. Starting with Bitdefender, the BD Soft team currently distributes more than six solutions in the country. BD Soft also has an office in Kolkata to cater the eastern part of the country and we have started sales in countries like Nepal, Bangladesh etc. Currently, BD Soft along with its partners have more than four lakh users across the country for various solutions. We are over 40-member team spread across India, working closely with our partners. BD Soft is upbeat with its past performance and is looking forward to the new financial year.
How does BD Soft provide comprehensive protection from malware and cyber threats?
BD Soft, being one of the leading IT security distributors, offers industry-leading enterprise-level, SMB and consumer solutions in the India market. Today, we boast a very strong portfolio for the Indian markets, which includes End Point Protector (DLP solutions) from CoSoSys, Storage Craft (Disaster Recovery), Proget (MDM solutions), Abbyy (Fine Reader), Bitdefender (Cyber Threats), a complete security suite, with proactive approach on preventing and detecting even the most advanced online threats. Our wide range of products focuses on comprehensive protection from malware and cyber threats to government and educational organisations, businesses and consumers.
How does BD Soft India, along with its partners, actively counter cybercrime and fraud?
BD Soft, along with its partners, educates their customers on cyber risk and how our solutions will help them in keeping security tight in their companies. The partners and our team interact with customers and brief them about the issues they can have without proper security solutions to protect their valuable data and digital assets.
How do you see the cybersecurity landscape in India?
The cybersecurity landscape in India has been going through a challenging yet opportunistic phase. The government has also been encouraging digitisation in the country, and so the businesses are digitising their processes and will invest more in digitisation in future years to come. Though technology has helped the organisations to scale up their businesses, it has also increased the cyber threats and security issues, like data theft, phishing e-mails, ransomware and other cybercrimes and fraudulent activities. Thus, it became necessary for the organisations, whether big or small, to understand the security concerns that can possibly attack their confidential data and devices. Cybersecurity being major business concern, companies are focusing on adopting innovative tools and security solutions to protect their sensitive data and devices from potential cyber-attacks and threats and looking it as a key part of the business strategy.
What are the security trends you have observed in India?
India’s cyber security needs are not different from that of the rest of the world; there is a host of areas which requires unique approach. The cyber security landscape is going through an interesting phase as businesses are keenly looking at innovative tools to protect themselves from cyber attacks and threats.
In terms of trends, data is the new oil and data breaches will continue as long as data remains a valuable commodity. As organisations understand the negative impact of data breaches and with data security and privacy guidelines like the GDPR, mitigation of data breaches through heightened and proactive web application security measures will be a top priority for organisations. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will be powering the ‘cyber war rooms’ and helping organisations across sectors to protect themselves from cyber attacks, as well as detect, predict and respond to the same. On the flip side, cyber attackers too would be weaponising AI/ML to initiate attacks with record speeds and precision. Almost all organisations will increase their expenditure on upgrading their security in their cloud environments because of the uniqueness of the threat actors on these systems. Organisations will be concerned to protect their cloud-based infrastructure and invest in people, processes and technology to fortify the layers of cloud-based networks, including insider threats.
What is the roadmap for BD Soft for the year 2020?
For 2020, our key priority will be to expand IT security solutions towards SMB and corporates. We have observed that there is growing demand for the type of solutions we are offering in the market and we are widening our target markets and groups. So far, the home security versions offered by our partner brands have been widely accepted and appreciated by the users. We will continue to focus and grow our consumer market share for 2020. The other key priority, will be to spread our presence across the country by increasing our reseller connect, increasing our distribution network, appointing staff across various states, increasing our corporate and government customer base and successfully spreading our solutions and services across the partner community.
