Interview With Anand Naik – Sequretek
This week we had the pleasure of meeting Anand Naik, Co-founder of Sequretek – a company that develops AI-based products for cyber-security purposes. We talked about different cyber threats and the importance of using various security methods in the ever-evolving age of information.
Private Internet Access: What is the story behind Sequretek? What sparked the idea?
Anand Naik: Cyber Security industry from a customer’s point of view can be divided in the world of have’s and have not’s – where the Top 10% has access to everything whilst the rest have to make do without much of any. As they say the industry is for, by and to the elite.
If you look at any technology, it goes through a curve where there is complexity in the beginning and over a period it becomes simple and commoditized. Security industry is going the other way where every year new technology areas emerge in response to new threats instead of enhancing existing technologies, the result is 90 technology areas, and 3500 different companies make security amongst the most fragmented market in the tech space. All these options make the life of Have-nots difficult since they do not have the resources to understand the what, why, when and how of their needs. There is way too much buyer’s remorse and consequential churn here.
Sequretek was born in 2013, therefore, with a vision “to simplify security by consolidating the technology landscape” and mission “to empower our customer’s growth without fear as their trusted security partner by simplifying security”. The key words here are removing fear attached security threats linked to the digital transformation that has become essential for our customer’s growth and the fact that we will make security simple and accessible to them as their trusted partner.
PIA: What services do you offer?
AN: Sequretek offers end-to-end security in the areas of enterprise threat monitoring, incident response, device security, identity & access governance through their own AI driven Percept Cloud Security Platform. The platform offers Artificial Intelligence based products, which allows enterprise customers to detect, protect, prevent and respond to all types of cyber threats, attacks and user behaviors.
1) Percept Extended Detection and Response (Percept XDR) – ensures end-to-end security, threat detection and response while allowing enterprises to focus on their core business growth without the fear of compromise. Percept XDR helps to protect against phishing, ransomware, malware, vulnerability exploits, insider threats, web attacks and many more advanced attacks.
2) Percept Endpoint Detection and Response (Percept EDR) – a cloud-native, comprehensive centrally-managed, cross-platform technology with an end-to-end response mechanism to detect and protect against advanced threats
3) Percept Identity Governance and Administration (Percept IGA) – a cloud-native offering for identity & access management of users. Percept IGA reduces access risks & ensures compliance to your regulatory requirements. It provides an easy-to-use, scalable, and federated identity-based solution to meet end-to-end access governance and administration needs for organizations
PIA: What is the mission of your company?
AN: Cyber security being a highly competitive market, there are many vendors in the market today who offer their different point solutions. And with the complexity that each solution brings in, you need an additional resource with accurate skill set to manage it, which in turn adds to the overall cost.
Sequretek’s Percept Cloud Security Platform offers Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions to ensure increased efficiency in threat detection as the element of human dependency to write rules to detect are eliminated. The algorithm self analyzes and create rules and identifies patterns which are malicious. This platform ensures end-to-end security which covers enterprise visibility and response, device protection as well as user access and identity governance; all through a single dashboard to provide a single pane of glass to have a view over your complete enterprise security.
We work with an aim “to empower your growth without fear by being your trusted partner and simplify security. Sequretek products offer cutting edge technology solutions (with inbuilt AI) for next generation threats. Our products are easy to use and implement, combine different technologies, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership.
PIA: What are the worst cyber threats out there today?
AN: Cyber threat landscape is continuously evolving with more stealth and sophistication. Advanced and hard to detect threats such as targeted phishing attacks, ransomware, coin miners, trojans, zero-day threats and persistent threats are today’s reality for threat management.
We believe advanced ransomware, phishing attacks, weak passwords and insider threats are some of the worst cyber threats. A small mistake committed by any employee of the enterprise (knowingly or un-knowingly) could result in a successful cyber-attack. Once attacked, the compromised data is sold in the dark web, irrespective of payment of the ransom amount. Unpreparedness of the enterprises to such attacks is a major concern as cybersecurity is often looked-up as the cost center.
CEOs need to start thinking differently and stop trying to measure the RoI from cybersecurity investments. A cyber-attack that was prevented, cannot be measured, but the impact in terms of loss of Critical Business Assets, IPs, Sensitive Information are crucial and can affect the brand, business continuity and compliance of the company. And who better than a CEO to decide what’s critical and what’s not?
From Nation-state and citizen perspectives, there has been lot of political turmoil in Asia which makes the threat actors a lot more active than they were before. These threat actors intend to steal sensitive data which would in turn create a situation of unrest amongst the nations. Citizens and Nations need to be aware of the on-going happenings and prepare themselves accordingly to safeguard themselves against such threat actors.
PIA: Why do individuals and companies need a good VPN?
AN: VPN ensures the creation of a tunnel between your device and a target application that you are trying to run. It essentially encrypts everything, so it becomes very difficult to tap what is the communication happening between your device and the target application. VPN provides encryption and tunneling capability, it creates a private environment as the name suggests.
PIA: What is the best way to protect their system from cyber threats?
AN: There is no single way to ensure complete protection against cyber threats, but following a few best practices mentioned below would help individuals and enterprises to protect against evolving cyber-attacks.
First and foremost, it is essential to patch the systems completely; following the guidelines shared by OEMs to make sure that your system is fully up to date.
Second, to have a new generation technology, anti-virus installed which will provide real-time and in-memory protection against viruses and cutting-edge threats.
Third is to follow absolutely basic activities of not clicking on “too good to be true” emails or links that are coming through, no matter how tempting they are. Follow cyber hygiene and do not contribute back to creating such links or forwarding such links. Simple user awareness is very important in this manner.
