In this video, Karthik Murthy, our Director of Sales Engineering, and Vishal Gupta, Director of Channel Sales, break down why cybersecurity is the #1 challenge facing businesses today and how microsegmentation can keep your operations running even during an attack.
Watch the full interview as it gives you a practical look at the technology keeping businesses alive.
Hello, and a very warm welcome to ET Studios, powered by ColorTokens. I’m your host, Devina Lason. Now, in today’s fast-evolving threat landscape, preventing breaches is truly no longer enough. As AI accelerates both the frequency as well as the sophistication of cyber attacks, organizations must pivot towards true cyber resilience, ensuring therefore business continuity no matter what comes their way.
Joining me today to unpack how exactly enterprises are navigating this shift are Karthik Murthy, India Field CTO, and Vishal Gupta, Director, Channels India, ColorTokens. Vishal, Karthik, a very warm welcome to ET Studios. Thank you so much for joining us today. Such a pleasure to have you both here. Thank you very much- Thank you so much
for having us here. Same here. Good morning. Pleasure is all ours. And, we’re here to deep dive into a really important topic, right? In your experience, of course, working with such a vast cross-section of organizations, geographies, industries, help us understand a little bit what it really means to build a cyber resilient organization, especially in the age of AI, right?
So to get kick-started, Vishal, maybe you could start us off. Just for some context why is stopping a breach no longer enough today? What do organizations really need to be looking forward to, and what does it take to keep a business running even in the midst of an incident? Yeah, I think that’s a very valid question you’ve asked.
See, times have changed. I guess we are living in times of AI now. Yeah. More or less, customers have come to terms that with AI, a breach has become very easy, right? And therefore, the old ways of handling a breach are no longer sufficient, right? So customers and organizations, when we talk to them today, they are not now looking at as to when the breach is happening.
What they’re trying to solve is how they will s- manage a breach when it happens. So the, the thing has shifted to that now. Yeah, absolutely. Karthik, same question to you. Why is just stopping the breach not enough anymore, and how can businesses really ensure the continuity despite an incident?
If you look at it, and I don’t want to really name any breach, but if you look at the, all the top breaches in the last one year or two years, all of them have mature cybersecurity solutions. It’s not that their cybersecurity posture was weak, right? So that’s the reason now, but breaches continue to happen.
So that’s where now security leaders are looking at, okay, you can’t stop a breach, but what can we do? How do you minimize the impact? And the key part is a A breach can just be an incident, or it can bring down the business. So where in the spectrum do you want to land? Absolutely. Wonderful. Let’s deep dive into that.
Vishal, coming to you, what role does microsegmentation play, right? As Karthik is referring to, we’re looking at an era where we’re trying to stop the breach, yes, but still continue the business make sure it’s not spreading across the network. So what role does microsegmentation play in this?
Okay. See, for the longest period of time, customers and security professionals today have been trying to build up a very strong perimeter, and the idea is that if we have a strong perimeter, we are breach-ready, right? But with AI and with Mythos coming in, all that doesn’t stand anymore, right? To give you a small input into this, so World Economic Forum- Says that for India, the number one challenge for the year is no political issue, is no poverty, right?
The biggest issue for India is cybersecurity, right? So that, that basically tells you the era we are living in, right? And so coming back to your question, so today, now that all that we have invested into is only on the perimeter, and with AI coming in, breaching the perimeter has become very easy. So customers today are bothered about business continuity.
What happen if I get breached? So you can look at microsegmentation as the plan B, right? If there is a breach, microsegmentation ensures that customers’ crown jewels are secured, right? We are able to quickly find that workload that has got breached and able to quarantine it, so that because of this isolation, because of the walls that we build, the breach cannot go forward.
It cannot move forward. So we are actually ensuring business continuity with microsegmentation. Wonderful. And Karthik, to you, of course, we cannot talk about this entire topic without understanding the impact of AI smart automation. How is this really helping organizations? How are we seeing that very either quick recovery or very quick incidence response thanks to AI or smart automation?
Like what Vishal added we are now looking at Mythos kind of attacks. So attackers are using AI. That- that’s a given now, right? So on the defense part, we are already seeing, even here in the booth, where you have a lot of AI-based SIEM and SOAR and so- the entire AI SOC coming in. Definitely these help in, identifying the attacks faster.
The typical, turnaround time is about forty-five minutes for a SOC today. The AI-based SIEM and SOC solutions can definitely shrink it, but you need to have a containment strategy in place. They can detect, but what do you do? You can’t go and pinpoint and quarantine each of your assets at scale.
But, so that’ll again end up in a business discontinuity or disruption, right? Like what we are building along with microsegmentation is something called as a breach response. We understand the business and break it into individual rooms, so that if there is an incident in one of the room, you cut that room off from rest of the building.
So even in spite of an attack, let it be a small incident, let your business continue. That’s achievable without even an- any network rejig with a microsegmentation solution. So looking at business continuity using AI. And Vishaal, let’s talk about some of the challenges, right?
How we are seeing organizations really manage a scenario where they’re still not able to get that clear, full picture of the risk that is there, a full picture of the connected systems. What exactly are organizations facing today, and what solutions do you have? Okay, so see, if you look at our enterprises today, our customers most of them have grown organically, right?
So over a period of time they have added infrastructure, they’ve added data centers, they moved to cloud, they’ve got SaaS solutions, and they’re always been in a more of a firefighting mode, right? So in an organization today security does exists, but it exists in very siloed spaces across all these parameters, right?
So what the biggest challenge for them is basically a visibility and being able to act fast, right? So if they’re able to do that, not just that they would get to know as to where an attack has happened but they would also be able to manage this faster and recover from it faster. So there, that, that remains one of the biggest challenge.
The second challenge is a lot of our customers are not just running IT environments, they’re also running OT environments, right? And in these organizations, again some 80, 85% of the attacks actually jump from IT to OT environment. So that again becomes a very important piece, right?
Because it immediately hurts customers’ operational readiness and can cause lot of financial losses if OT gets into the larger scheme of things. That’s exactly what CISOs and CIOs are looking at, right? To get an end-to-end visibility so that they can understand what has gone wrong and be able to recover from that faster.
And Karthik, to you, taking this forward, when it comes to really creating that very resilient security system in-house how would you guide organizations to make sure that, of course, the setup is robust, but it’s not too complex to run and to maintain at the end of the day? Today the environments are very diverse, right?
It’s no more except for some of the BFSI sector that we see, it’s not completely on-prem. You’re spread across cloud, on-prem. You have multiple security solutions. So the typical conversation that I’ve had with all CIOs and CISOs is, we don’t want to try to boil the ocean, right? Start small, even from a microsegmentation perspective.
We brought in the features which is proprietary to us is you go by layers, identify the high-risk paths that the attackers may take, block them down, restrict them to specific IP addresses, sources, who can talk to whom. Then let’s get down to the core application kind of traffic, right?
We call it progressive segmentation, but that has given us a huge leeway into deploying faster, making sure enterprises adopt microsegmentation. Because- Historically even if you talk to 10 cybersecurity leaders, eight of them I know will say microsegmentation is hard to implement. It looks good on paper, implementation is hard.
So we flip the entire our policy modeling so that now you can go with the highest path. It’s all mapped to tighter MITRE TTPs, right? And then you look at the applications at the last. So it gives you the maximum benefit in the shortest amount of time. Then of course you can take the crown jewels and go ahead.
So we are also prioritizing business continuity and not just the security aspect because there’s always a trade-off there. You try to implement something, you break, you roll back, so you never move ahead. That’s what we are trying to ensure that these projects complete, people are able to implement it, see the benefits.
Just to add to what Karthik mentioned one feature that we’ve recently come out with is ensuring that our solutions can be rolled both as agent as, and agentless, right? So what it basically ensures is that, we are able to roll out microsegmentation with least friction in customers and large organization places, and also get quicker outcomes for them, right?
So yeah, that’s another thing that I think is helping the customers big time to get more out of microsegmentation. Wonderful. So gentlemen, we’ve discussed so much today. Before we wrap up, is there kind of one key takeaway, one key piece of advice you can leave all our security leaders with when it comes to that one tool or perhaps a habit that absolutely must be implemented this year, this month, as soon as possible?
See, my one suggestion is to get most visibility, right? Visibility never hurts anyone, right? There might be organizations which have a lot of it already in place. But we have a tool. We do a report called BraYa. We do it at almost zero cost for our large organizations and customers.
My, my suggestion is to get a BraYa report done, and that will basically give them a visibility as to where they stand and what they can do better at. So that is one of my asks. Wonderful. Visibility. Yes, please, Karthik. I would say- Do you have a complete view on the network on how does my entire digital business look in an event of a breach?
What can I lose? Because if there is an attack, you are going to lose something, right? We are talking about not if a breach will happen or when the breach will happen. So what are you okay to lose? What do you want to protect? Do you have a breach containment strategies in place? Have you checked out the boxes so that using AI, when there is a bad day, on a bad day, you can cut off those, the, the ones that you can lose and still protect your crown jewels.
So that, that is absolutely a must to have now. Wonderful. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here and really sharing with our audience what it means to build a truly resilient organization today in the age of AI. Thanks for sharing all your insights. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.
Same here. Appreciate it. Thanks for your time. All right, on that note, from what we’ve seen from moving beyond perimeter security to embedding AI-driven resilience into daily operations, it’s clear that business continuity is truly the ultimate benchmark for the modern enterprise. Do stay tuned to ET Studios for many more in-depth conversations with the inspirational leaders from the world of cybersecurity.
Until next time, many thanks for watching.
