France based IT security company, NETASQ is providing sigficant and very strong level of security to every size of organizations across the world. We at ‘InfoSecurity’ spoke to Dominique Meurisse, Executive VP, NetASQ, to understand NETASQ’s strategy and vision for Indian market, at the launch of their India operation.
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Dominique Meurisse, Executive VP, NetASQ, to understand NETASQ’s |
1)Which best way can you describe NETASQ's expertise in security industry?
NETASQ is a United Threat Management technology pioneer and visionary, and we are a leader in security appliances. Our award-winning solutions are designed to protect the networks, data and applications of our customers against what has become an ever-increasing issue to them, i.e. cyber-criminal activity.
Our customers particularly value our capacity to block intrusions, hackers, viruses, malware and spam as well as filter content. They highly rate our ability to reduce internal risks and to enable secure mobility with our SSL and IPsec VPN with unique IPS features.
Since its inception in France, ten years ago, NETASQ has a double digit growth year over year. We employ ninety people world-wide and are a profitable company.
Our vision is to permanently innovate in order to protect businesses of all size with the highest level of security against both known and unknown threats, also known as zero-day threats. Our customers range from SMBs with a few workstations to the largest multi-site infrastructure both in the private and the public sector.
To date, NETASQ has sold fifty thousand appliances, to over fifteen thousand customers worldwide, thirty percent of which are in environments which are highly sensitive to security issues (governmental organizations, military forces, the European Council, banks or Nuclear Industries. None of them have complained to have suffered damages after being attacked.
At a time when there are daily reports in the media or on Internet of prejudices met by companies after they have been the victims of security attacks, NETASQ’s solutions clearly stand out from those developed by other security vendors.
2) Which are the major security areas, NETASQ wants to dominate?
NETASQ wants to offer the best security Firewall to proactively protect its customer form security breach at real value including Enterprise (Next Generation Firewall-IPS) and SMB (Unified Threat
Management)
3) How should you distinguish NETASQ's UTM and IPS solutions from others?
NETASQ has designed the most powerful technology to proactively protect against the newest forms of cyber threat. NETASQ Software Engine is designed at the driver of the Kernel and starts at the highest OSI model of deep stateful inspection of the content (Protocol & Heuristic Analysis, Contextual Signatures) and then should the threat have not already been blocked, activates traditional security features such as IPS and FW.
NETASQ offers a unique performance to integrate both VPN IPSEC and SSL capabilities with the benefit of IPS analyses. NETASQ UTM offer is based on NETASQ IPS-FW and integrates the uncontested leaders of Content Security such as KASPERSKY, OPTENET,... to offer the best Unified Security without any compromise in performance.
4) How efficient is NETASQ's response team to block and cure today's most sophisticated, complicated and blended threats?
Thanks to NETASQ IPS engine, as per today more than 90% of the Threats are handled proactively. NETASQ's labs focuses its effort on creating new protections on existing protocols/applications aside from Threat emergent, therefore when threat arises the protection is already there. This method has demonstrated its efficiency for example against Conficker, Sockstress, Kaminsky Flow etc. In addition, NETASQ's labs in partnership with major Emergency Response Teams and Application Vendors all over the world run operation 24/24 to offer the best answer.
5) How significant is Indian market for NETASQ globally?
According to analyst, only 15% of Indian enterprise is already connected to Internet, which means already a biggest amount of connection than Europe! Having in mind that India is now forecasting of 15% growth in 2010 (OECD), India is the biggest NETASQ potential for the next years.
6) What is your product roadmap and business strategy for this subcontinent?
By being there and partnership with local representative (ZOOM) NETASQ wants to recruit more than 500 resellers to cover the large India landscape and be closed to specific India's requests, which was the successful way implemented so far in Europe and Middle East. We will also launch our new product “UTM as a Software” allowing to use NETASQ benefits in virtual environment and help SMB or Enterprise to reach the highest level of Security with drastic cost reduction.
7) As India is already flooded by several UTM solutions, how much capable is NETASQ's solution to establish its own footprint there?
By offering at the best price and with local proximity, a real Security appliance, I think that there is no reason not to be successful over there such as we do in all parts of the world. So far, more than 85% of Enterprise which has tested NETASQ appliances has purchased it!
8) What is your technical support and after sales support strength in India?
NETASQ is now established in India with 24/24 support and training center to offer the best coverage of after sales support requested to do business in India. More than 1.000.000 $ has been invested to build the foundation of NETASQ India
9) How do you see India as market in next few years?
As all analyst predicts, INDIA is one of the fastest growing market and after 27/11 the concept of to trust in its security is definitely mature. Also I think that India will count for more than 30% of NETASQ revenue in the few years.
10) Can you give our audience some valuable customer feedback that demonstrates NETASQ’s value?
Our customers’ feedback truly demonstrates NETASQ value. Let us take a few examples:
Amadeus in Spain delivers next-generation solutions to travel agencies mostly to make airline reservations. They experienced a significant increase in the number of web transactions due to the success met by low-cost companies, and did not want this to impact their business SLA of three seconds to acknowledge a reservation.
After testing different solutions, they chose NETASQ to secure their highly sophisticated and intense web traffic, thereby blocking all malware and viruses which could affect their business SLA.
Persian Bank in Tehran, Iran is another example. During the most recent presidential election Iran experienced the most damaging cyber attack known worldwide. They wanted to secure their business and after conducting in-depth testing and a thorough analysis of the logs provided by the different solutions they envisaged, they chose NETASQ. Their reason was simply that NETASQ solutions provide the most comprehensive information in the area of log collection as well as the highest level of protection.
Another great illustration is the reason why we were selected by a French bank. This bank was concerned about phishing attacks made to online banking environments and the impact this might have on their business.
They conducted an exhaustive risk analysis and discovered that there existed some very specific types of attacks which could potentially give unauthorized access to their online accounts. Since their current security provider could only recommend waiting for the development of specific patches, they decided to evaluate other solutions including NETASQ.
They were most impressed because this threat was already blocked by NETASQ software engine and therefore implemented NETASQ solutions throughout their web data centre.
Another business ca se is the example of the public integrator of Telecom Malaysia. This company has overall responsibility for secured internet access to the public and governmental organizations in Malaysia. Given the particular nature of their customers and the obligation to protect highly sensitive information they chose NETASQ and have been using our solutions for five years now.
—By: Dominique Meurisse, Executive VP, NetASQ |
