Talk us through what Paladion Networks is all about and what IT offerings do you offer clients in the Middle East and Africa (MEA)?
Paladion Networks Pvt Ltd provides professional and managed security services in the Middle East and Africa. The company has operations in India and other markets globally. Our professional security services include security assurance, consulting, compliance, governance, testing, monitoring and management. We also provide managed network, application, and process level security assessments and testing services and managed GRC services, such as ISMS maintenance, risk analysis and policy design, managing installed security products, reviewing policy adherence, regulatory and compliance reporting, incident response and management, project management, product implementation support and user training and awareness. In addition, we offer security products management services, including firewalls, IDS, anti-virus, content filters, email security management and configuration, performance and fault management, and identity and access management solutions services.
What is Paladion focus in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) market in 2015?
The MEA region is an important market both from a business and revenue contribution perspective. Last year, the MEA contributed more than 50% of our total revenue globally and that was achieved because of the security awareness that most organisations have adopted and the need to protect their IT infrastructure, networks, applications and data.
This year focus our focus in growing our business in this region is twofold and this includes enhancing our managed security services by offer consolidated security offerings that can be accessed via a cloud based model and the threat managed services, which are predominantly offered remotely via monitoring of an organisation’s IT infrastructure or systems through the security operations centre (SOC).
Earlier this year Paladion launched its Global Security Operations Centre (GSOC). What was the main motivation behind this move and how different is this from the SOC?
The launch of our GSOC has been designed to provide clients from the Middle East with the highest level of round-the-clock protection and services. Through this initiative, we have expanded our services capability by opening a state-of-the-art facility in India and linked the GSOC with existing regional SOCs. We currently have SOCs in Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Hanoi, Toronto and Herndon. With the Middle East seeing a significant increase in region specific malware attacks and other global, malicious cyber threats, Paladion being the region’s only analytics driven managed security services provider can leverage both its regional insight and global expertise to make proactive security monitoring and rapid incident management a reality. This makes our offering a one-of-a-kind service in this region, and sets a new benchmark for information security providers everywhere.
How is Paladion gowing its footprint across the Middle East and Africa?
Primarily our focus is security and we are strategically promoting our offering by working directly with larger enterprise organisations and through partner alliances with companies interest in tapping our broad array of solutions and offering these to the market.
Because maintaining a tactical advantage in the security defence is paramount for any business, Paladion has an upper hand in security operations and this cannot be achieved with traditional security operation centres. Enterprises across MEA must leverage analytics and big data to predict threats and look at advanced security innovations to protect their businesses from security breaches. We are confident that our approach to providing intelligent security management techniques is helping organisations to not only be ahead of the evolving cyber threats, but to predict when vulnerability might occur.
Other than the SOC and managed security offerings, what other services is Paladion pushing in the region?
Aside from the technology and products approach, what sets us apart from other managed security services providers is the fact that we have the capability to build platforms and solutions internally to suit a specific vertical or client’s requirement. The managed security services we offer have been complemented by other offerings in the area of managed vulnerability and through this service, we are able to take a client through a range of issues to help them to understand the threats to their infrastructure, network, applications and IT systems. To enhance corporate governance across the region, Paladion now offers expertise in governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and the beauty about this is that it’s not about technology or products but helping and guiding organisations to develop comprehensive security policies that comply with regulatory frameworks.
Are organisations in the Middle East warming up to cloud and services offered via SOC?
It’s is still early days and what we have been doing as a specialist managed security services provider is to educate and raise awareness around cloud-based offerings and the type of services an organisation can access from the SOCs we have around the
We have a competitive edge because most of the solutions we offer customers are developed internally using our own IP. Security is vital for any size company and using our approach, we have been able to help customers design and develop comprehensive security policies and frameworks that help to intelligently secure the big and small company.
Our model is that organisations can get the appliance, hook it up to their networks and they can buy all the service services to our platform.
Which are your key verticals that Paladion is serving in the Middle East and Africa?
We primarily are targeting the financial services, it and business process outsourcing (BPO), manufacturing, telecoms, healthcare and energy. The services that we take to these segments include managed security, security consulting, security compliance and security testing. We are driving and promoting these services using a hybrid approach through our own internal sales and channel partners for the managed services and other cloud-based solutions. To this end, we have hired a person who has an IT distribution background to help us drive and promote our offerings through channel partners that are willing to tap into our offering and be able to offer these to their end user customers.
Looking ahead, where will majority of your growth come from this year?
In terms of verticals, almost all the segments we address will contribute to the overall figure for MEA. That said, we are expected our SOC offering and managed security services to continue gaining momentum across the region as organisations realise the benefits of in terms of cost serving. We are also expecting our vulnerability management programme to open opportunities for the company as this is critical within any organisation to identify, classify, re-mediate and mitigate any vulnerabilities. Organisations that set up effective vulnerability management programmes take a proactive and pre-emptive approach for the safety of their applications, software and networks and are significantly safer from data breaches and theft.
