Forescout aspires to deliver “Data Powered Security” aligned with Make in India

For California-headquartered Forescout Technologies, India as a market holds great potential. As a part of its long-term plan, the company has committed to scaling its business in this market by investing in resources, partners and customer success. Subbu Iyer, Regional Director for India & SAARC - Forescout Technologies in a chat with VARINDIA throws more light on how he views the India market in terms of opportunities and the security landscape -

How do you view the India market in terms of its security landscape and the opportunities?

The Indian cybersecurity landscape is currently going through a phase of rapid transformation. The advent of digital India, ever evolving threats and the work from home environment has accelerated various cybersecurity initiatives. While sectors like IT services, Banking & Finance had started early, we are witnessing exponential growth across all industry verticals including manufacturing, energy, government, and healthcare.

Today cybersecurity professionals are dealing with not only changing threat vectors, but they are also facing increased challenges due to an ever-expanding scope of connected devices which can be anywhere. Hence most organizations want to assess and remediate risks across their digital terrain which includes IT, OT and IoMT environments. Forescout can help address these challenges by providing solutions that empower customers to gain visibility, get insights through data analytics and orchestrate automation actions to uncover and mitigate risks across their IT, OT and IoMT landscape.

How do you plan to build your presence here?

We see great potential in India and are committed to scale our business here with investments in resources, partners and most importantly customer success. Our journey in India started about 4 years back and thanks to our customers and partners we have been successful in building a business with more than 100 customers in the region. We have also doubled our sales presence this year with coverage across major cities in the country. India is a strategic region for Forescout with significant investments planned over the next 2 years to build the region as a Centre of Excellence.

What will be your Go-to-Market strategy? Will it be the Channel route or Direct Sales for now?

Forescout has always believed in the power of partnerships, and we drive 100% of our business in India through an ecosystem of highly skilled and focussed partners. We also have a team of experienced sales and solution specialists giving customers increased access to Forescout ecosystem. Additionally, our local sales presence helps develop, re-energise, and enable our channel ecosystem to drive our customer success goals.

Our GTM strategy is through channel partners however the Forescout India team along with our channel partners are committed to helping customers effectively design, adopt, build, and manage Forescout solutions to simplify their cybersecurity journey.

Could you throw some light on the latest product - Forescout Continuum?

Forescout Continuum is a new platform that delivers visibility and automation across all types of assets – IT, IoT, IoMT, OT and Cloud – which collectively represent the digital terrain of an organization.

Forescout Continuum delivers full asset visibility across an organization’s digital terrain. This comprehensive visibility and asset inventory provides the foundation for automated cybersecurity actions that deliver asset compliance, network access control, and dynamic network segmentation. This complete package provides customers a strong foundation for Zero Trust networking and enables security teams to focus on what really matters rather than chasing false alerts.

Which segment or vertical of customers are you targeting with your new product? How do you plan to empower them with your solutions?

Forescout Continuum builds on 20+ years of Forescout innovations that protect many of the world’s largest companies and most trusted organizations in finance, government, healthcare, manufacturing and more. The platform builds on a proven solution widely deployed across thousands of companies and government organizations, including 27% of the G2K, to secure the most complex environments at scale.

With this new platform Forescout customers gain data-powered intelligence to accurately detect risks and quickly remediate cyberthreats without disruption to critical business assets.

What kind of security trends have you seen in this market in the last few quarters?

Cybersecurity breaches have become routine, but that hasn’t reduced their impact. The threat landscape continues to shift and evolve as the number of connected devices rises and more functions become “smart” or automated. Security programs must keep pace though as you can’t protect what you can’t see and the risk exposure to an organisation is only increasing.

Forescout’s Project Memoria, an in-depth review of technology IP stacks used by millions of connected devices all over the world, identified 97 different types of vulnerabilities across these stacks used in thousands of government, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail environments. Chief information officers and chief information security officers must have visibility into all devices on their network to mitigate against these risks and secure their networks effectively otherwise a breach or vulnerability will cause untold damage.

Ransomware attacks are also on the rise and there is no reason to believe this trend will reverse any time soon. Malicious actors will continue to find new vulnerabilities to exploit – they are almost certainly looking at operational technology and IoT devices as targets after witnessing the impact of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack.

What will be your long-term strategy for this market?

Three things that we are aiming to achieve in the Indian market with our long term strategy –

For Forescout to be known for delivering “Data Powered Security” for all IT/OT/IOT/IOMT environments aligned with a “make in India” direction.

To continue to grow our customer base across key verticals where we believe we have the right platform, solution & organisation to be a long term strategic partner to government, healthcare, manufacturing and other key vertical organisations which are strongly compliance driven.

Continue to build our partner ecosystem to support our local customers. We are working with local System Integrators, MSP, Cloud Providers & VARs to localise our brand presence and solution offerings for the Indian market.