Enterprise India on Security Solutions

Sometime in January, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting with Vice President of Symantec in India – Shantanu Ghosh (he also has an interesting food & travel blog). We discussed the emerging challenges of security landscape in India. What was surprising is apart from viruses, spamming and phishing were equally troublesome for security professionals.
An interesting discussion revolved around the declining margins for security solutions. With plenty of FREE security solutions available in the market (including Microsoft Security Essentials), Symantec would be looking for new revenue models. That’s when it came to my attention that Symantec is a big player in the online archive and enterprise security solutions as well.
Since then, I had been looking to understand the challenges corporate India faces in the field of security? Recently, I discovered this abstrusely named report by Microsoft – Make Noise Check Noise. The report represents a wide variety of industries including software, telecom & engineering and included a wide variety of professionals (IT professionals, Business Decision Makers, End users and Developers). This report is based on a survey of over 1200 users in Nov 2009. So what does the report say?

1. The key drivers identified for security spending in India were driven by:
1. Data Security and Privacy
2. Protecting IT Infrastructure
2. Users voted multiple security vendors in an IT environment as one of the biggest headaches for them followed by Multiple Passwords for authentication.
   This is understandable as multiple vendors bring their own update policies, license agreements and different quality of support to the enterprise making their management most difficult. The hoops one has to skip when one forgets a password for an enterprise service are hidden from no one. The ones troubled by this most were the ones who create this complexity – the IT administrators.

The report does end with recommendations on what could security vendors focus on:

• Make Security solutions simple
• Simplify the management of the security solution
• Help customer understand vendor consolidation and its benefits

And now with Cloud services gaining ground in enterprises, there would be new challenges that the security vendors will need to start thinking about..