Kaspersky has big plans for India, will be investing in people & tech: MD

Over the next 10 years, India will be going through a rapid digital transformation, said Adrian Hia, managing director for Kaspersky in Asia-Pacific

In May this year, cybersecurity and digital privacy solutions firm Kaspersky announced the appointment of industry veteran Adrian Hia as managing director for Asia Pacific. Kaspersky has been increasing its presence among the partner ecosystem and has been increasing its headcount in India 20 per cent Y-o-Y. Adrian Hia in an interview with Shivani Shinde shares that the company has high expectations from the region, but within that India will be key. He shares that Kaspersky has big plans for India and will be investing in people and tech. Edited excerpts:

Kaspersky recently signed an MoU with IIT-Bombay to advance cybersecurity in education and research. What are your plans for expanding business in India?

We have been investing a lot in the education sector. IIT-Bombay is an important tie-up for us. For us when it comes to cybersecurity there are three fundamental points.  

First is the fundamentals of cybersecurity awareness. India is going through a rapid digital transformation. You can build the best firewalls, and secure yourself, but if people do not change, they do not change passwords for 10 years, bad things will happen. So the first part is how awareness can be built.

Second is talent, and this is not India specific issue, but globally too we have seen reports of gaps in cybersecurity skill sets. This tie-up will play a key role in that.

The third part is the business demand and opportunity for us here.

How significant will be India for Kaspersky?

When I was appointed for this role, I was told that the company has very high expectations for Asia-Pacific (APAC). This is going to be the highest growth region for us. Within APAC, India is the most populated country in the world and so our expectation here is high. While we want to grow business in India, we will be doubling down on investment in people and technology here. We have a big plan for India. We recently strengthened our India team and onboarded Jaydeep Singh to head India operations.

What solutions and capabilities are you bringing to the Indian market?

Over the next 10 years, India will be going through a rapid digital transformation. Every business wants to have India exposure. The price of rapid digitisation, unfortunately, is that more data is being digitised, which means businesses will be going on the cloud, and companies will have a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, on-prem, and all other combinations. Because of the need for the business to digitise as fast as possible, so that services can be delivered to users faster and in a seamless manner, the need to double down investments in cybersecurity is also crucial.

What we have seen many times is that governments and businesses make huge investments so that services are delivered on time, but little focus is given to the requirements of security.

You will see us coming in and promoting our solutions. All the capabilities that you can see that are relevant and important as part of digital transformation will see us doubling down our resources and bringing related tech to India.

How do you plan to grow your B2C business?

Globally we have 400 million internet users of our products. We are in almost every corner of the planet. India is definitely moving away from buying security products in boxes. We are beefing up the digital team in the country so that we build more focus on the online segment. We will be focused on the partner ecosystem as well as work with e-commerce partners for more products online.

Generative AI has been the buzzword, how has Kaspersky been using AI in security?

We continue to invest in artificial intelligence (AL)/ machine learning (ML) to understand as much as possible about malicious attacks. We work extensively using these technologies. We also have to double down on these technologies as the bad guys are also using the same to dupe users.