Security assessment company Ixia focuses on security and monitoring of networks across enterprises and the government. Its idea is to train all the medium and large companies and government organisations to identify and protect the network in cyber security, says Murali Ramalingam, Country Manager and Senior Director-Sales, Ixia India Business, in an exclusive interaction with Souvik Goswami of Elets News Network (ENN).
What is the overview of Ixia and its business interest with respect to the Indian market?
The Indian government is not spending much on cyber security as compared to the budgets it has allocated to the IT sector. In the coming six years, the Internet of Things industry is going to be worth $15 billion which means that the threat issue is going to be larger. The cyber attack, which happened last year, was the reason behind a loss of $315 billion over a period of 12 months. My company is the leader in the cyber security and we are the force point in all the technologies that we launch in the market.
Ixia is in India for the past 10 years and we strictly follow the Make in India programme. We have 250 developers in Kolkata working on developing the hardware, software for Indian enterprises and government departments. We also have global support from Bengaluru. We have engineering, sales and system people based out of Bengaluru. We manufacture products according to Indian needs.
The Indian market is changing tremendously. There have been lots of trends in IoT and cloud and for Ixia, the major focus is on security and monitoring with respect to enterprises and government. This opens a huge opportunity for India.
Many government programmes like Digital India, Smart Cities, Mygov etc involve Big Data and hence its security is also of paramount importance, what relevance does Ixia hold in this context?
Evolving technologies like software developed network, migration to cloud are taking real shape. The coming year is for skilled people who can help drive this network. With the evolving changes in technology in India, there are opportunities and challenges. For example, in smart cities all the systems are connected electronically and if you don’t make that system secure, then you can have major issues. It is also important to ensure
It is also important to ensure security of critical information and government establishments. In this context how is Ixia going to help?
Security of critical information and infrastructure is at highest priority. State nations have a new turf to defend i.e., “CYBER” after land, sea and air. Ixia plays a critical role in helping secure the critical information. Take Ixia’s Cyber Range for example it helps test and defend critical infrastructure and train manpower. The most important place where Ixia have a critical role to play and we differentiate ourselves is to take care of 360 degree security that requires – trained manpower along with right tools. Cyber Range provides real life situations and allows users to train themselves to combat in a real event of cyber-attack. In a war, you have to prepare yourself before going to the war itself. Same way, in cyber range, we also simulate the attacks. We also pump the traffic along with the regular and the malware traffic and the IT staff is being trained and also certified in looking at these cyber threats. What expansion plans do you have in India, especially in the government sector? The Indian government is the largest buyer of defence equipments. So defence is the key for us. After Uri attacks, cyber attacks from our neighbours were predominant. Cyber protection for defence networks is the key for us. We work for three major segments. The first one is the enterprise segment, second one is the telecom segment. All the large carriers in India have equipment to simulate real life conditions to the Random Access Memory. The third one is the network equipment manufacturers like Cisco, Juniper etc. We have equipment to test their product before it goes to the market.
What expansion plans do you have in India, especially in the government sector?
The Indian government is the largest buyer of defence equipments. So defence is the key for us. After Uri attacks, cyber attacks from our neighbours were predominant. Cyber protection for defence networks is the key for us. We work for three major segments. The first one is the enterprise segment, second one is the telecom segment. All the large carriers in India have equipment to simulate real life conditions to the Random Access Memory. The third one is the network equipment manufacturers like Cisco, Juniper etc. We have equipment to test their product before it goes to the market.
Also Read: CloudStorm: Ixia’s Multi-Terabit Network Security test platform