Cisco to set up new data centre in Chennai, launches new security products for India

IT networking company Cisco is setting up a new data centre in Chennai and upgrading the current one in Mumbai to offer enhanced security solutions to customers, the company said as its two-day Cisco India & SAARC Partner Confluence started today in Jaipur.

“The new and upgraded facilities will bring agile, highly resilient, high-capacity access closer to users, including large and small Indian enterprises from across industries,” the company said in a statement, adding that this is crucial in today’s hybrid work environment which presents unique cybersecurity challenges as organisations move from a static to a dynamic operating model, which in turn has significantly increased the demand for cloud security. 

The company has also announced new capabilities across its security portfolio to help Indian firms become more resilient and tackle cybersecurity risks in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. These capabilities, according to Cisco will include the “latest innovations in Zero Trust, application security, and secure connectivity” that are aimed at driving Cisco’s cloud security business. 

Zero Trust is a security framework requiring all users, whether in or outside the organisation's network, to be authenticated, authorised, and continuously validated for security configuration and posture before being granted or keeping access to applications and data. 

Daisy Chittilapilly, President, Cisco India & SAARC, adding that these “new innovative cyber capabilities, will expand the company’s security data centre footprint”, and help them in building a “dedicated engineering workforce in India to help organisations fortify their defenses and catalyse their transformation in the digital age”. 

Additionally, the company launched several new features for its Duo risk-based authentication solution. Cisco Duo can adjust authentication requirements for users in real time, based on contextual risk. These features can address security issues, including remembered devices and Wi-Fi fingerprint to authenticate less often in trusted situations and notify and allow users to reset their passwords before they expire, improving productivity for modern enterprises, the company said in a statement. 

Last month, Cisco announced a technology preview of a cisco full-stack observability platform based on instances of open source OpenTelemetry agent software being advanced by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to collect metrics, event, logs and distributed traces. The Cisco Full-Stack Observability platform will be available in June 2023 globally, it said.  

The networking company said that it is betting heavily on concepts like secure access service edge (SASE) and zero-trust to be adequately prepared to tackle the risks these shifts present. SASE combines traditional network security functions with software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) capabilities. 

For Cisco, India remains a critical market and its second largest R&D centre outside the USA. As per Statista report in November 2022, in FY-2022, Cisco employed close to 80,000 people globally. The company said – without divulging specific numbers - it has a sizeable workforce in India in the space of security engineering, who are instrumental in innovating with cutting-edge security solutions.  

Notably, the company’s rival and cybersecurity company Fortinet has also announced several enhancements to its single-vendor SASE solution dubbed FortiSASE to enable additional deployment flexibility and new secure access capabilities for digital resources across private applications, SaaS, and the internet. 

“In today's work-from-anywhere world where users are on and off the network accessing distributed applications,” Vishak Raman, Vice President of Sales, India, SAARC & Soutwest Asia at Fortinet, said in a statement. He added that new updates to FortiSASE enhance our ability to extend FortiGuard Security Services across the SD-WAN edge and cloud edge.  

Meanwhile, in a February 14 report, market research firm Gartner has said that Indian enterprises will spend $2.65 billion on security and risk management in 2023, an increase of 8.3% from last year. The analyst firm added that cloud security spending in India is forecast to experience the highest growth rate among all the other segments in 2023. The segment is projected to grow 25.8% in 2023 as Indian organisations increasingly switch to cloud workloads and applications.