Blue Coat Systems with over two decades of presence in the global market caters to the demands of government as well as private sector. Managing Director, Blue Coat Systems India, Ambarish Deshpande talks about company’s USP in securing technology and cloud infrastructure. Excerpts from an interview with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN)
Blue Coat Systems is an international provider of software services and cloud data protection solution to its clientele. Kindly describe your presence in Indian Market. What are the various organisational sectors that Blue Coat Systems provide their solution to?
We are a premium cloud data protection solution provider with over two decades of existence in the global market. Our USP lies in securing technology and cloud infrastructure as more and more individuals and organisations started understanding the importance of virtual storage of information through cloud. As more organisations start storing their confidential data in the cloud (such as customer, employee information and intellectual property), hackers finds a way to gain access to this data. At Blue Coat, we primarily secure the systems and gateways from getting corrupted by any malware or suspicious items. With over twenty years of experience in this sector, we are currently among the top ten security companies with our core expertise in http and http’s security. We are in partnership with antivirus solution provider vendor like—McAfee, Symantec.
At present we provide our services to primarily three sectors— Government, BPO and IPO and Banking which are the sectors that possess huge confidential data and are susceptible to frequent attacks in the virtual world of internet and Cloud storage. While the banking and finance industry calls for compliance driven services, the government or PSU sector carries important information about public sector and the IT and ITES industry carries sensitive customer information.
What is the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in convincing prospective clients for using your products and solutions over other superior competitors in the market? How do you cater to BFSI industry?
Blue Coat is an ace solution provider in enterprise security, providing on-premise, hybrid and cloud-based solutions for protecting web connectivity, combating advanced threats, and responding to security breaches. Being a global market leader in securing connection to the web, we count nearly 80 per cent of the Global Fortune 500 as our customers. Blue Coat has a long history of protecting organisations, their data and their employees and is the trusted brand to 15,000 customers worldwide, including nearly 80 per cent of the Fortune Global 500. With a robust portfolio of intellectual property anchored by more than 200 patents and the company continues to drive innovations that assure business continuity, agility, and governance.
We are the only vendor to observe no delay at proxy-check and protect all users through cloud gateway, even outside the premises. Blue Coat provides both encryption and tokenisation of sensitive data before it leaves an enterprise’s environment and heads to the cloud for processing and storage, ensuring only authorised individuals can see it in the clear. It does this while ensuring that cloud end-users maintain critical application functionality, including the ability to search and sort data, send emails, and generate reports using data that has been encrypted or tokenized.
For the BFSI industry, we secure communication procedure happening in the system, ensure prompt responses, cater with DCP protection with integrated partner solution, compliance monitoring and security analysis. Security, compliance and governance are key factors in the Financial Services market. We are able to provide financial services customers with a comprehensive solution that protects sensitive data as part of their efforts to meet their unique compliance and governance regulations.
How would you describe the affinity towards Blue Coat Systems by the public sector (Union Government, Central PSUs, BFSIs and State Governments) and the private sector (especially Large Enterprises)?
With our years of experience of operating successfully in this sector, we have felt the gradually growing affinity of the public and the private sector enterprises towards Blue Coat Systems. According to statistics, three out of five top enterprises in the Indian market, from various sectors are our customers presently.
Many government offices and private offices do not support or facilitate usage of specific applications and social networking sites in the office for specific reasons. But, with our solutions, now it is possible to block specific activities like games etc. in social networking sites, which hampers work-hours. This system of granular blocking in social networking sites or certain websites ensures optimum utilisation of these sites for professional purposes and developments.
Kindly throw some light on roadblocks, if any during the integration of products and solutions of Blue Coat Systems? How effective is your investment protection to customers?
Mobile malware and particular ransom-ware make a lot of money for the bad guys and we will witness a significant boom in both the sectors in the coming years. A fresh target is mobile device- handheld phones and tablets. Criminals have already attacked much of the low hanging fruit and they are not just targeting individuals but also organisations who have not properly backed up their sensitive data- which may include images to source-codes to manuscripts.
Another major challenge that we face is to integrate with root vendors and compete and integrate our solution with other existing market leaders like CISCO and Websense. At Blue Coat Systems, our products are unique among other existing players and hence, have a unique set of clients. Our customers see values in our products for the past 17 years. Among the several solutions that we provide, packet shapers and cache flow management are few key ones. In the past three years, we have acquired six companies including Normon Shark, Solera Networks. With time, we have gathered an increasing foothold ensuring profitable RoI for customers. Though there is a trend of changing vendors but that does not happen with business correspondents.
What are the three typical demands from modern CIOs of Indian organisations either in Public or Private Sectors?
The Cloud Generation Gateway is an essential component of The Blue Coat Security Platform which addresses evolving network, security and cloud requirements with five advanced solutions that work equally well across on-premise and cloud-managed environments are advanced web and cloud security, encrypted traffic management, advanced threat protection, incident response and network forensics, network performance and optimisation.
The biggest concern pertaining to this topic is the demand and expectation of accessing internet is severely high. There is a shift in trend in original expectation to new that allows rhetoric access to the internet. There is also demand from present days CIO for maneuverability to simple solutions. A demand for technology resources and overview from vendors is also the need of the hour.
Please give us an overview on the Government’s Digital India initiative. What is your strategy for the initiative?
At this point of time, when the Centre has announced such an important and huge revenue project, with an ambition of taking internet facility to the every nook and corner of the country as a free basic, it is essential that we strengthen our existing infrastructure, before developing any new one. It is crucial to develop internet bandwidth as an infrastructure, ensuring connectivity, security, Cloud with in-built security and securing information. That apart, it is also vital to strengthen GSTN networks and business correspondent mode to co-operate with system integrators and leveraging cloud infrastructure.
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