Skyhigh Security chalks out plans for India market

Skyhigh Security, a spinoff of McAfee Enterprise’s secure access service edge (SASE) business, has announced its expansion plans for the India this year. The company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Gee Rittenhouse, who was in Bengaluru on Wednesday, exclusively told TechCircle that the Skyhigh Security is “increasing its workforce by roughly 25% in India over the next two quarters to support the increased demand, both locally as well as globally”.   

The San Jose, California-based company currently has around 700 employees globally, of which over half of the employees are currently located in Bengaluru.    

Skyhigh Security was formed out of McAfee Enterprise’s secure access service edge business. In January this year, Symphony Technology Group (STG), a Menlo Park-based private equity firm split McAfee Enterprise into two organisations — Trellix and Skyhigh Security.  

Earlier, FireEye and McAfee Enterprise officially merged in October 2021. While Trellix formed from McAfee and FireEye’s extended detection and response (XDR) businesses, Skyhigh remains was created to satisfy the growing cloud security requirements for large and small organisations.   

The company is focused on security service edge (SSE) market, where it retained a leadership position, according to Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant report in this category. Apart from Skyhigh Security, other players dominating the global security service edge market are Zscaler, Netskope as well as technology giants like Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, the research firm said.   

The SSE market is the security component of SASE that unifies all security services, including Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), to secure access to web, cloud services, and private applications.    

The marker is booming as hybrid workforces are constantly looking for consistent security solutions from the cloud. Total market revenue for SSE was approximately $2.5 billion in 2020, with the market growing at upwards of 21% year over year. The biggest market trends that are driving adoption of security service edge solutions include the hybrid workforce model, SD-WAN transformation and a significant increase in cloud adoption. 

By 2025, 70% of organisations that implement agent-based zero trust network access will choose an SSE provider rather than a stand-along offering, up from 20% in 2021, according to research firm Gartner.   

Talking specifically about its India market plans, Rittenhouse said, “India is an extremely lucrative market for us and in the next few months, we're increasing both our R&D presence as well as our customer success teams in India. He also said the company is on a hiring spree to support the increased demand, both locally and globally, since majority of our development and support team is here.   

On what differentiates Skyhigh Security from its competition, Rittenhouse said, it is its “data aware” approach to meeting cloud security needs for customers that separates the company from other cloud players.   

Elaborating on the approach, he said, in order to protect data, a company will set up policies on endpoints, in the cloud and in SaaS applications but keeping track of all this is complicated. Our data policy engine" simplifies data protection across clouds and endpoints.    

“With the help of its “data policy engine” all policies are “attached to the data itself,” Rittenhouse said. That allows you to protect it, see it, understand where it’s going, who’s sharing the data with complications.      

“While Skyhigh Security is a fairly new company, we have very deep technical roots. A lot of the technology that we have is over a decade old and we’ve been a leader in this cloud journey, even before the cloud market really materialised,” said Rittenhouse. He added that “many of our products were first to market in this digital transformation and were a part of the product portfolio inside of McAfee Enterprise which also had a large development centre in Bengaluru.”   

The company has 3,000 customers worldwide, with a focus on financial services, healthcare and government. Rittenhouse said, in India too, these markets are large and often complicated from a compliance regulatory and governance perspective.    

The advantage we have is again because we focus on a data driven approach and endpoint, so we can give our clients the visibility and the protection they need in their highly regulated environments.    

“The recent digitisation of banks and digital payments environment, as well as the various digital initiatives by the government will give us a lot more opportunity to serve the market. And, as we continue to grow, we hope to help more customers across verticals with their cloud security needs in India.”   

The company is also engaging with channel partners to put value-added services on top of its platform and will formalise that over the next quarter.