We all make mistakes and it’s impossible for mankind to get rid of them. But the greatest curse of cyber security is that there are attackers waiting for those mistakes to happen and they often pounce on it vigorously, engendering catastrophic effects. The pandemic and the new work from home culture which followed presented field days for the cyber attackers. Citing the data from Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the Union home ministry recently told Parliament that the cyber-attacks amid the Covid-19 pandemic rose by almost 300 percent last year in the country to reach 1,158,208 compared to 394,499 in 2019. Pune-based eGyanamTech is manifesting how automation of Cyber Security and in turn minimizing the human errors is the need of the hour towards solving this predicament. The company today is leading cyber defense initiatives based on Automation, Optimization and Orchestration for the government as well as private organizations. In an endeavor to further explore the exciting propositions of eGyanamTech, CIO Insider interviews the duo at the helm, Sudeep Saxena and Rashmi Chandra.

In conversation with Sudeep Saxena and Rashmi Chandra, Directors, eGyanamTech

Ever since the global technology boom started, the cyber security market has only grown up. Over the years, it has also been impressive the way the industry has responded to the dynamically evolving threats. Where is ETS positioned in the current cyber security industry?
The Cyber-attacks have been ever increasing both in terms of coverage and sophistication. It now only takes two-to-three minutes to launch a Cyber Attack, whereas the best of Security Operation Center (SOC) teams take a minimum of 15 minutes to many hours to even effectuate a basic response to a Cyber-attack. The currently prevalent manual nature of incident response is slow and error prone, and we are talking about the global scenario.

We believe that Automation in Cyber Security will play a key role in defining organizations’ Cyber Defense strategy. However, it needs to be strongly supported by Threat Intel, Diagnostics and Education for an organization to become fast and smart while responding to Cyber Attacks.

eGyanamTech is continuously working to ad-dress the challenges of slow and error-prone response to cyber incidents in a holistic manner, taking multiple aspects of enterprise security into account.

The pandemic has sky-rocketed cyber-attacks and data theft. How has been your response to this? What’s new?
The pressure on enterprise security teams is in-creasing with every passing day, burdening the SOC teams much more than ever before. The organizations need to strictly focus on improving their response times to potential Cyber Attacks by over-coming all internal weaknesses. There is no way around it. Even before the pandemic, the human error was already a major cause of ‘cyber insecurity’, and it hasn’t changed much. The employees would unknowingly or recklessly give access to the wrong people. With the new norm of work from home, how-ever, the problem is even bigger. This makes the Automated Incident Response and Effective Vulnerability Management the need of the hour. We are launching our Automation & Aggregation Platform and Unified Vulnerability Life Cycle Management Platform in May 2021 to address these markets.

Tell us about your Automation-driven Cyber Defense Centers, incorporating the details of innovations and technology frame-works behind them.
The lack of Automation in the SOCs is the single most vulnerable factor in Cyber Defense. A study by IBM says that human error is the reason that leads to more than 90 percent of cyber-attacks across the world; much more so in work from home times.

With our extensive experience and knowledge of this domain, we were certain that Automation in Cyber Response aided by AI was the demand that was about to hit the world. We had an excellent team in place, spanning across both the domain and the programming aspects.

Our close association with the various customers in this field also strengthened our resolve to develop solutions for this critical gap.

The enterprise product development in Cyber Security needs a proper lab mimicking the real environment for development and testing. We have this

whole setup in our lab in our office in Pune which is used not only for development and testing, but also for training and simulation. We are using the battle-hardened libraries for Automation, Big Data analytics and AI to improve the security posture of companies.

Share with us a success story about one of your recent implementations.
Our product journey in fact started because a premier Government organization had procured a SOAR Automation solution from IBM, which had to work with an RSA NetWitness SIEM based SOC. They realized very soon that there are major compatibility and integration challenges, jeopardizing the very purpose of procurement of an automation-enabled SOC.


Rashmi Chandra,Director Operations

eGyanamTech was brought in to solve this problem. We addressed this challenge by developing and implementing our ‘Parham’ automation broker solution. Parham is Industry’s first of its kind multi-functional Security Automation Broker solution which plugs the gaps in a traditional enterprise security environment. The broker established communication amongst the SOAR and SIEM to achieve the desired Automation objectives which were not being delivered through the previously procured solutions.

Where is the company headed in the years to come? What’s eGyanamTech’s future roadmap?
Our focus on automation for Cyber Security has equipped us to evolve with our product. A fast and smart cyber response has multiple dimensions. We are covering most of them by developing solutions for Threat Intel Aggregation and Remediation, Diagnostics and Education for Cyber Security. We plan to launch different products in a phased manner in the next 12 months' period.

We are part of Atmanirbhar Bharat with truly Made-in-India critical solutions and plan to take them global. We are currently present in India and the Middle East with offices in Pune and Dubai. We are planning to set up our operations in the US and Europe in the next three years.