India is our fastest-growing region, with an annual growth rate of 50%: Dynatrace's Subbu Subramanian

The shift to hybrid and multi-cloud environments is impacting cloud security for Indian businesses, leading to greater complexity and expanding potential attack surfaces. In an exclusive interaction with TechCircle, Subbu Subramanian, Country Director – India, Dynatrace, a U.S.-based technology company believes that enterprises, particularly in regulated sectors like banking and fintech, are recognising the need for built-in security in their solutions. He explains why cloud security is about resilience, compliance, and agility, necessitating platforms like Dynatrace for simplified security and real-time insights, and outlines the company’s plans for the Indian market, which according to Subramanian is one of the company's fastest-growing regions. Edited excerpts.

How is application security in cloud-first environments different from legacy environments?
Cloud-first application security requires a different approach than legacy methods. Unlike static applications secured reactively within fixed perimeters, dynamic, containerised, and distributed cloud-native applications demand continuous application security. This involves deeply integrating security into the software development lifecycle for real-time vulnerability discovery and analysis, correlated with application behaviour in production. Advanced solutions prioritise vulnerabilities based on business impact, enabling focus on critical risks. Cloud-native security necessitates a proactive, contextual, and automated approach with intelligent observability, real-time insights, smart filtering, and automated remediation, allowing security solutions to adapt as quickly as modern applications evolve.

How can observability ensure actionable insights from large datasets for error prediction, detection, and correction?
Observability transforms large datasets into actionable insights for error prediction, detection, and correction. By collecting data across all IT layers and understanding component interactions, AI-powered observability detects anomalies, determines root causes, and assesses business impact. This enables proactive optimisation by predicting failures and facilitating rapid resolution, such as pinpointing the cause of transaction slowdowns. Ultimately, comprehensive observability ensures business resilience, protects uptime, enhances customer experience, and drives competitive advantage by turning data into meaningful action.

How does Dynatrace plan to maintain its growth momentum in the global SaaS market?
Dynatrace aims to sustain its SaaS market growth by capitalising on the demand for intelligent, automated solutions driven by cloud-native adoption. Unlike point solutions, Dynatrace's all-in-one platform offers full-stack observability, advanced application security, and AI-powered analytics via its Davis AI engine, which delivers real-time insights for faster issue resolution and reduced complexity. Dynatrace is reinforcing partnerships with cloud leaders (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud), enhancing Kubernetes and AI observability, and investing in emerging markets like India. This strategy includes expanding its partner ecosystem and developing talent through Dynatrace University, ensuring a platform built for clarity, automation, speed, and future scalability.

What are the top industries Dynatrace is catering to in India? 
Dynatrace caters to industries where digital performance directly impacts business outcomes, such as banking, fintech, and B2C enterprises. Examples include resolving UPI failures for a major Indian bank, optimising healthcare billing systems, and monitoring factory operations and e-commerce channels for automotive companies. Dynatrace targets organisations where real-time data, competitive pressure, and complex digital infrastructure intersect.

What are your plans for the Indian market for the next 2 years?
India's rapid digital transformation, fueled by UPI adoption and cloud migration, presents a significant opportunity for Dynatrace. As one of our fastest-growing regions, expanding at over 50% year-on-year, India offers unrestricted growth potential for the next decade. The rapid embrace of AI integration by enterprises, accelerating customer and citizen-facing AI use-cases, positions India as the AI use-case capital of the world, bridging the gap between current realities and future potential. This digital-first mindset and widespread adoption will catalyse the observability market.

What are the key obstacles to observability implementation? What should CIOs know?
The biggest hurdle isn’t technology, it's about perception. Tool fragmentation, with separate solutions for logs, metrics, traces, and security, leads to data silos and slower incident resolution. Observability platforms offer unified observability, powered by AI, with automated correlation and insight. CIOs should consider scalability and automation, as well as skills and alignment through training like Dynatrace University. CIOs must see observability as a competitive advantage that drives innovation, ensures uptime, and protects the business.

How does Dynatrace tackle AI-cloud security challenges of businesses?
Dynatrace helps enterprises tackle AI-cloud security challenges by enabling AI innovation while ensuring security and observability. The AppSec module connects security risks to business applications, revealing their impact. Davis, Dynatrace's AI engine, prioritises alerts and automates root-cause analysis. Dynatrace provides a unified platform for performance, security, and observability, empowering enterprises to embrace AI confidently.

With AI introducing new attack surfaces such as exposed LLM endpoints, how can CISOs stay ahead in the game?
AI introduces new attack surfaces, like exposed LLM endpoints, requiring CISOs to be proactive. Visibility is key, to understanding how AI is used, what data it accesses, and how it interacts with other systems. Dynatrace observes AI-powered applications in real-time, highlighting unexpected behaviours or risks and tying alerts to their impact. AI-powered filtering and root-cause analysis help manage alert fatigue. CISOs must integrate observability, application security, and automation into a continuous process to stay ahead of modern threats.