Gopan Sivasankaran is a distinguished figure in the technology and cybersecurity arena, boasting a remarkable career spanning numerous achievements in the field. With a wealth of experience and expertise, Gopan is renowned for his pivotal role in steering organizations towards digital excellence while championing effective cybersecurity strategies. As the General Manager-META at Secureworks, his leadership has been instrumental in shaping the company’s trajectory towards success.
Over the years, Gopan has harnessed his profound insights to guide organizations through the intricacies of the cybersecurity landscape, ensuring they remain resilient against evolving threats. His dedication and innovative thinking have not only garnered respect but have also earned him recognition and accolades within the industry. Gopan’s contributions have positioned him as a leading voice in the cybersecurity domain.
In this exclusive interview, we inquire into Gopan’s extensive knowledge and visionary outlook on cybersecurity. With the ever-accelerating digital transformation across industries, the importance of securing digital assets and fortifying defenses against cyber threats has never been more critical. Gopan shares his insights on the significance of seamlessly integrating cybersecurity into an organization’s overarching business strategy and fostering a security-centric culture to navigate the complex cybersecurity landscape effectively.
- In your opinion, what are the key cybersecurity challenges and can you provide insights on the emerging trends of the cybersecurity threat landscape?
Cybercrime is big business, and ransomware, along with hack and leak data extortion, are the biggest threats to organizations today. Most of the time these attacks are opportunistic. One of the most common ways these attacks are executed is through exploitation of known vulnerabilities. Patching and maintenance of the technology environment is critical. Law enforcement is making great strides through the removal of the Genesis info stealero marketplace and the shutdown of Qakbot, one of the most prolific pre-cursors to ransomware. Cybercriminals in the long term adapt and evolve their operations.
- What are Secureworks’ plans for the META region to assist its customers in their digital transformation efforts? Can you highlight the services or products the company offers to facilitate this transformation?
We see a significant market for Secureworks® in the META region. As cyber threats across META become more prolific, organizations are for a platform -based approach to help prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats that integrates across their entire IT landscape. Critically, they want something that reduces complexity and replaces it with a simplified view of cyber threats, risks and the actions they need to take. They are seeking to be smarter, stronger, and more secure.
To solve this challenge, we offer Secureworks Taegis™ a SaaS extended detection and response (XDR) platform which offers faster mean time to detect and respond to threats. Taegis is an open platform that integrates in all other security telemetry to provide a holistic view of an organization’s threat landscape and help improve their overall security posture. Also, recognizing most organizations do not have a 24/7 security operations center (SOC) to monitor the threats, we also offer a managed detection and response (MDR) solution, Taegis ManagedXDR.
With Secureworks MDR offering, customers can benefit by having a cost-effective extension of their security team who is always on investigating the most critical threats and responding to those threats as needed.
To further assist customers, in June this year we announced our Partner First strategy across the Middle East to give customers the freedom to choose who they want to work with while utilizing Secureworks.
- Given the dynamic nature of cyber threats, what core factors should CISOs consider when evaluating cybersecurity solutions for their organization?
The cyber threat landscape is dynamic and ever changing. Cybersecurity solutions must evolve just as fast to be effective in defending organizations from cybercrime. CISOs do not have an easy job to understand the current threat landscape, their own security posture, and from there identify their own biggest areas of risks. With limited budget, and in most cases even more limited teams, they need to balance the right mix of security solutions that protect them from cyber threats but is also maintainable with the team and partners they have surrounding.
To do so, the priority must be to drive positive security outcomes while effectively scaling security operations. Three questions help identify an organization’s risk are:
- Where can we mitigate the risk with the best prevention capabilities?
- How we best detect threats across our organization that break through our prevention methods?
- If breached, what is our response plan and can we successfully respond to a threat to avoid damages?
To achieve these outcomes, CISOs should be looking at an open platform that maximizes current investments, detection, and correlation value, along with response capabilities, in the most efficient manner is the best path.
- Secureworks has positioned itself as a leader in the industry. What unique value propositions (USPs) does Secureworks bring to the highly competitive cybersecurity market?
Secureworks adds differentiation with Taegis ManagedXDR in four core ways:
- Superior Detection – Secureworks integrates telemetry across all IT and even OT assets. Then, using our proprietary threat intelligence and machine learning, Secureworks weeds out the noise to find the most critical threats. We find that in all the telemetry we aggregate for our customers, 99.6% are false positives.
- Unmatched Response – One of the benefits in working with Secureworks is every customer can chat or call a security analyst directly and get a response within 90 seconds. Additionally, should a breach occur, we have a fully robust incident response team to support and offer unlimited response for any asset we monitor. We are always there for our customers.
- Open without Compromise Approach – The Taegis XDR platform is open and vendor neutral with hundreds of integrations. What stands out the most is our support for mixed endpoint detection & response (EDR) environments. Most platforms only support one. Over 30% of our customers use more than one agent in their environment. We support Crowdstrike, Microsoft Defender, SentinelOne, and Carbon Black, and for those who don’t have a full agent we include our own Taegis agent.
- High ROI – We have proven our transparent pricing and solution includes an agent and one year of data retention. Our customers have high ROI with low total cost of ownership. Most of our customers have said that they save close to $500K a year in people costs. There are also additional cost savings in breach avoidance and in many cases profit gains by increased productivity and reduced downtime.
- Based on your extensive experience, what piece of advice you’d give to organizations looking to navigate the complex cybersecurity framework effectively?
Threat actors don’t sleep. Attacking through vulnerabilities, phishing, remote access, and social engineering can severely compromise an organization’s system.
What I have observed is lack of fundamentals. Areas such as 24×7 security monitoring, Vulnerabiltiy management, multi factor authentication, network segmentation to name a few are fundamentals those are overlooked.
As far as SOC is concerned, I would suggest every organization should try to improve their visibility, reduce complexity and have capabilities to do incident response.