Kaspersky Set to Provide Security Solutions for India’s 100 Smart Cities Plan

Kaspersky is a Moscow-based multinational company with a presence in nearly 200 countries worldwide. It specifically deals with software and critical infrastructure designed to exist where data is often needed to be protected. These are along the lines of the directives set by the company’s founder, Eugene Kaspersky.

Kaspersky’s Critical Infrastructure Prevention (CIP)

The prominent anti-virus vendor first shed light on its ‘Critical Infrastructure Prevention Suite (CIP) at the Interpol World Congress 2015, held in Singapore during April.  The product generated a lot of attention and acclaim in its scope and objectives, with Indian officials looking in keenly.

“We will provide a complete security solution which will deal with all kinds of cyber threats,” said Altaf Halde, managing director for South Asia at Kaspersky Lab.

“As India plans to build 100 smart cities, a lot of data will be collected by different bodies and this needs to be protected. This is where we want to come in as vendor,” Halde said.

Kaspersky revealed the CIP suite, stating that the suite will help organizations, critical industries and more with recent research studies indicating that:

  • Only nine percent of industrial sector based IT professionals were certain that they had not been breached due to a cyber attack.
  • Strikingly, sixteen percent added that they had no process or plan in place to detect vulnerabilities, borne out of the fear that such an inquiry would bring unwanted attention to probable system vulnerabilities.

In making inroads within the Indian market, Halde said Kaspersky will soon sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a listed, prominent business management firm in India in order to bring in and sell its proprietary CIP suite.

The potential in global markets

In earning a reputation as one of the world’s foremost security vendors, Kaspersky was recently credited with detecting the Equation and Carbanak group viruses which are counted as among the biggest global cyber security threats after the recent attacks on banking institutions.

In admitting to markets such as India not offering much in the consumer segment, Halde noted that the enterprise section provided plenty of scope and opportunities for the CIP suite, with recent programs such as the Digital India initiative.

“Currently our India plan is restricted to the CIP suite and there are no joint ventures or new facilities being planned. In India we have been growing at a rate of nearly 16-20 per cent year on year,” Halde said.

Kaspersky actively monitors nearly 500,000 threats on a daily basis world-wide and even though there are presently 20 employees in India, the Indian arm contributes to nearly three percent to the $700 million in global revenues for the security vendor.