The outbreak of pandemic caught the world by surprise. Every company had their single most focus to ensure continuity clearly and more rightly so bringing every other aspect including security to backstage. We at CyRAACS were completely on the cloud and hence Work From Home had zero impact on our productivity. We were heavy on digital collaboration much before the pandemic and hence the ‘New Normal’ was like fish in the water. Going forward, CyRAACS is planning to increase its revenue by threefold in FY’ 2021-2022, says Suresh Iyer, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder at CyRAACS, in an interview with Elets News Network (ENN).
1. What was your vision behind laying the foundation of Cyber Risk Advisory and Consulting Services (CyRAACS)?
When we started CyRAACS in 2017, the niche consulting companies were either the large consulting companies or large IT services companies having small cybersecurity consulting practice. There were very few players in India providing consulting and advisory exclusively for cybersecurity. Largely the very large enterprise segment used them and the medium-to-large enterprise segment needed a credible player. We started with the vision to address this segment and provide world-class cybersecurity consulting services to our clients. In 3 years, we have completed more than 350+ engagements with over 100+ clients ranging across multiple industries, geographies etc.
The stable political leadership and the specific emphasis of our Prime Minister’s vision to have dedicated world-class consulting companies in India and the great emphasis on Start-Up India, Digital India encouraged us.
2. Covid and its adversities have affected almost every sector across the globe. What challenges did you come across?
This pandemic caught the world by surprise. The complete lockdown in April-June 2020, nearly made all business crumble. Every company had their single most focus to ensure continuity clearly and more rightly so bringing every other aspect including security to backstage. While we saw a marginal increase in our business, the orders received were largely to cater to the absolute compliance need of the clients. The niche consulting services took a back seat.
We were completely on the cloud and hence WFH had zero impact on our productivity. We were heavy on digital collaboration much before the pandemic and hence the ‘New Normal’ was like fish in the water.
3. What changes in terms of leadership did you witness post the outbreak of the pandemic? How are you helping the company to convert the challenges into opportunities?
High empathy with clients and our pragmatic approach to their needs have always been our core strength. Our focus sharpened towards BFSI sector needs and brought out a number of initiatives to help our clients address their problems.
CyRAACS launched a relevant Work From Home Assessment, to focus and provide a maturity report on the enterprise’s preparedness to handle cybersecurity threats from Work From Home. We also launched our own home-grown Malware Analysis tool to identify the active and residual malware in the endpoints. Both these were received well by our clients and we started getting back to normal by September- 2020. This quarter October to December has been just fabulous, we have made 300-400% growth over the previous Q3’s.
4. Digitization has now become the priority of every sector. In these times, how is CyRAACS helping financial institutions with their solutions especially in terms of security?
The Reserve Bank of India has already laid out clear guidelines for every type of financial institution from a cybersecurity perspective, what they should possess at the minimum. IRDAI, SEBI has also provided clear guidelines for their respective sectors. CyRAACS has built an easy to adopt compliance management framework to help these institutions to comply with these regulatory guidelines, besides helping the clients implementing the cutting-edge best practices and technologies that can help be a clear business differentiator with that competition. CyRAACS has also built a quantitative reporting of compliance through a metricized scorecard. On a short-term basis, engagement of CyRAACS’s maturity model assessment help our clients understand where they stand on cybersecurity and what are their opportunities to improve.
The government of India has also increased their focus in cybersecurity by bringing in stringent norms for empanelment with CERT-In conducting rigorous online/ offline assessments to evaluate and certify credible Information Security Auditors. We are proud to be one among 33 (which was earlier 90+).
5. What are your plans for 2021? How is the BFSI sector going to get benefitted from your future innovations?
Our compliance management framework and our unique solution on continuous posture monitoring, detection, and self-healing on infrastructure will be of great benefit for compliance driven regulated industries like BFSI. CyRAACS is planning to increase its revenue by threefold in FY’ 2021-2022.
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, Suresh Iyer, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder at CyRAACS talked about the challenges and opportunities amid Covid outbreak and CyRAACS' plans to increase the revenue by threefold in FY’ 2021-2022.){kind=link}