Cisco unveils key initiatives to speed up digital business transformation
Deepening its commitment to enhancing cyber security in India, Us-based tech giant Cisco inaugurated its Cyber Range Lab in Gurgaon last Wednesday.
Dr. Gulshan Rai, National Cyber Security Coordinator, Government of India, inaugurated the Cyber Range Lab in the presence of Dinesh Malkani, President, Cisco India and SAARC and V.C. Gopalratnam, SVP, Ciointernational, at Cisco India Summit 2017 themed ‘Winning the digital era’.
The Cisco Cyber Range Lab aims to provide highly specialized technical training workshops to help security staff build the skills and experience necessary to combat new-age threats.
“As cyber security threats have become more complex, targeted and persistent, modern cyber defences require proactive security operations, run by highly trained staff with the experience and expertise to detect and disrupt sophisticated threats. With the launch of Cisco Cyber Range, we are helping our customers to be prepared to identify and mitigate a threat before it becomes a crisis. The Cisco Cyber Range Lab is now a reality for customers looking to find an advantage against the growing legions of cybercriminals and next generation threats. The Cyber Range Lab in India underlines our commitment to secure and partner with India in its digital transformation,” Malkani said.
The lab will immerse participants in simulated real-world cyber-attacks to train them on how to properly prepare for, respond to, and manage a broad variety of threats, he added.
This experience can be leveraged by companies, academicians, customers and the government and their security teams, he said.
Dr. Rai congratulating Cisco on the launch of its Cyber Range Lab in India said, “With this launch, Cisco has taken a leadership step to enhance the security of India’s digital infrastructure and speed up digitalization of India.”
The lab will use 200-500 different types of malware, ransomware and 100 attack cases to deliver realistic cyber attack experiences.
The training will also educate organisations about the necessary steps required to be taken to respond quickly in the wake of an incident from addressing a basic threat to monitoring and analysing malware infections and providing actionable information and intelligence to customers.
To help increase the pool of talent with critical cyber security proficiency, Cisco announced a US $ 10 million Cyber security scholarship globally in June last year. The Cisco Networking Academy programme has enhanced its security portfolio with a new Cyber Security Essentials course. In India, the Cisco Networking Academy programme has trained 122,000 students and is committed to training an additional 250,000 students by 2020.
Meanwhile, Cisco will also launch a Security Operations Centre (SOC) in Pune — its fourth after the US, Poland and Japan in the coming months to provide a broad range of services, including monitoring of threats and its end—to—end management for enterprise needs. It will be linked to other Cisco SOCS across the world. These centres are said to be part of Cisco’s US $ 100 million investment commitment to India.
Cisco says it has invested in 25-26 start-ups in India and is actively looking for more companies that are working in the Internet of things (IOT) and security space.
SME sector
Cisco is also looking to increase its SME customer base from 30,000 to 90,000 over the next three years.
“We have about 30,000 SME customers in India, and over the next three years we aim to triple this to over 90,000,” noted Nal Gollagunta, Managing Director, Commercial Sales, Cisco India and SAARC.
According to the company, there are about 50 million SMES in India, out of which, only 2 percent are currently digital. “So, there is tremendous interest of IT firms in SME modernization in the country. The opportunity is huge and we are committed towards digitization of Indian SMES,” stressed Gollagunta.
The networking giant whose 20-30 percent business in India comes from the SME sector said that the surge in the penetration of 4G network in India led by telcos like Reliance Jio is opening up new opportunities across different verticals and success of e-commerce portals are encouraging SMES to go digital. “Going forward our goal would be take increase the share from 20-30 percent to 50 percent,” said Gollagunta.
Sri Lankan market
Touching on the Sri Lankan market, Gollagunta said the country which is coming out of a lull over a long period of time, has so much potential for growth.
“I don’t look in terms of numbers but relevance. What we look is whether we are relevant to the right stakeholders, industry, conglomerates or the government.
“There are a few sectors which we are very bullish about. They are apparel, tourism and banking. These areas are hugely untapped and possess in-built capabilities. Why aren’t these sectors taken beyond what it is? Forty years ago, Sri Lanka was a competitor to Singapore. There was a lull thereafter. But the advantages have not gone away. It is still there,” Gollagunta noted.
Shoppers Stop
The Cisco India Summit also saw Cisco and Shoppers Stop, India’s leading fashion retailer collaborating to implement Cisco Wireless Solution across 80 Shoppers Stop stores in India.
This alliance is aimed to accelerate the digitization of Shoppers Stop stores in-line with its omni-channel strategy through which the company aims to achieve 20 percent digitallyinfluenced sales by 2020. In select stores, Shoppers Stop is piloting the Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) capabilities integrated with Cisco Wireless Solution for enhanced, personalized experiences for shoppers.
With Cisco Wireless Solution, Shoppers Stop will gain a single view dashboard of connected customers in the store, insights into customer behaviour analytics, traffic flow and dwell time analytics, location-based services and analytics for effective in-store marketing and in-store tracking. With over 4.6 million First Citizen loyalty programme members and one million Shoppers Stop mobile app downloads, Shoppers Stop can use anonymized aggregate data to provide mapping, directions and personalized in-store promotions to customers.
Meanwhile, in March, Cisco also unveiled its first ‘Made in India’ product. India is the 12th country to house Cisco’s manufacturing facility apart from nations like the US, Mexico, China, Brazil and Malaysia.