GRC Market gaining Traction

 Kartik Shahani,
 Country Manager,
 RSA, India & SAARC

Given that enterprises in India are becoming increasingly conscious about the need for stringent monitoring measures, the GRC market is gaining significant momentum. 

In January this year, RSA acquired Archer Technologies which is a leading provider of enterprise governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions and has more than six million licensed users. With the regulatory environment in India evolving rapidly, RSA is of the opinion that it will open up a huge market for GRC solutions in India and lead the way for Archer's market leadership in the country. 

VARIndia talked to Kartik Shahani, Country Manager, RSA, India & SAARC, to know more about the latest on the GRC front. 

How big is the GRC opportunity in India? Is it a fragmented market? 

The GRC market in India gained significant momentum in 2009 and according to a recent Forrester Research Report, the GRC technology industry comprising of software, consulting and related services is currently growing at 24% year on year and is slated to grow from $2.6 billion in 2009 to over $24 billion in the next five years.

To address the second part of your question, GRC is hugely fragmented. Even today, standard documentation tools are used for GRC which can act as a hindrance, especially when the organization is moving up the maturity cycle. Today, there are tools available in the market which can help automate GRC and help organizations save time and cost. GRC, till date, is done by most manually making it very time consuming, cumbersome and costly. 

Also, various vendors define GRC in their own way. This adds to the complexity, vagueness and also creates a hurdle.  

Tell us something about the current trends in the GRC market globally and in India? 

India has always been a GRC service provider by companies like Wipro, TCS, etc. GRC always existed in some form or the other, but now organizations are looking at tools to streamline it while also reduce the cost of compliance.  Also, now with global regulations becoming more prominent and events like Satyam scam, GRC is fast becoming critical for organizations. Therefore, we see a great traction for GRC in the market. 

At RSA, we have witnessed that enterprises are increasingly turning to GRC solutions to both improve visibility in their enterprise-wide risk posture and automate compliance processes. GRC helps in meeting security best practices and protecting business-critical information which has become key to the survival of most organizations today. 

Given that enterprises in India are becoming increasingly conscious about the need for stringent monitoring measures, the GRC market is gaining significant momentum. 

Also, the evolving statutory and regulatory environment including international regulations; financial & legal bindings, S&P credit ratings; competitive pressures, process efficiency and optimization and finally transparency to stakeholders and improved accountability are forcing enterprises to look at GRC as a business essential tool. 

What impact did the Satyam scam have on the adoption of GRC in India?

The Satyam scam had quite an impact on the regulatory environment in India. While the regulators have always existed, the guidelines and penalties have now become more stringent with no place for errors or slippage. Companies across sectors are also feeling the heat with more legal liability being placed on them to ensure there is no room for any mistakes or mishaps.  

What are Archer's offerings for enterprises including SMES?

In January this year, RSA acquired Archer Technologies which is a leading provider of enterprise governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions and has more than six million licensed users. 

We believe that the combination of Archer with RSA's industry-leading technologies for information risk management and information security significantly extend RSA's solutions portfolio for visualizing and managing risk.

Traditional security management focussed primarily on addressing technology issues, but the real challenge our customers faced was in the areas of policy management, audit and compliance. The Archer solution not only offers the visibility into risk and compliance that customers need, it brings stronger policy management capabilities to the RSA portfolio. The end result is that customers are able to better manage their security programs and prove compliance across both physical and virtual infrastructures, and effectively communicate to the business.

With the regulatory environment in India evolving rapidly, RSA is of the opinion that it will open up a huge market for GRC solutions in India and lead the way for Archer's market leadership in the country. 

RSA has GRC as a service offering for the SMEs. Also, Archer GRC is offered on the cloud which the smaller organizations can take advantage of. 

Tell us the top five industry verticals in terms of their contribution to your topline?  

For RSA, retail, banking and telecom are the main contributors to our topline. In addition to these, the IT and ITeS industries are also significant contributors. Since these industries are data intensive and attach maximum value to this data, protecting this asset is critical to them.

As I see it, these industries will continue to be our key focus areas in the long run as well. However, over the recent years, we have also witnessed a lot of interest from sectors like healthcare and legal.

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M.Tech felicitates RSA! 

 Bhavin Bhatt,
 Country Head - M.Tech India

M.Tech Solutions (India) took the initiative to share the latest best practices of the information security pace. The objective of the concourse held on 3rd December 2010, at The Le Meridian was to identify the emerging information security threat and explore the numerous concerted developments organisations around the world which are undertaking to enhance their IT security strategies.

The seminar was presided by Bhavin Bhatt, Country Head - M.Tech India.  Mr. Bhatt presented M.Tech as the one stop for all IT security products and one of the best Value Added Distributor. M.Tech started its operations in India in the year 2007 and within a short span of 3 years, has established itself as a leading value added regional distributor of IT security, Application Delivery Network, WAN Optimisation and Storage.

M.Tech presented the premium provider of security , risk & compliance solutions - RSA. Sunil Rangamani, Channel Sales Manager, RSA, Southern Region, said that RSA solutions helps the customers in providing a holistic approach of authentication solutions through their products such as SECURE-ID, SIEM , DLP, Identity management, GRC, etc.

For more contact: Deepak Singh
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