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“Digital infrastructure is critical in transforming a city and creating a sustainable smart ecosystem”

With innovation at the heart of its operations, network security solutions provider SonicWall has been preventing cybercrimes for over 25 years. In a candid interview with Chahat Jain of BW Smart Cities, Debasish Mukherjee, Country Manager India & SAARC how crucial digital infrastructure is in transforming the cities of future and the role of new age trends like IoT, cloud and machine learning in driving the growth of network security market.

How do you think digital infrastructure can enable a smart city ecosystem?

Digital infrastructure is critical in transforming a city and creating a sustainable smart ecosystem. In today’s day and age, it is in the best interest for the stakeholders to implement integrated technology solutions to enhance public services (electricity, mass transit etc.), reduce costs and improve the quality of life for its residents. This has a big impact on the economy as smart cities drive innovation and, attract investors and businesses. In addition, the digital infrastructure will also play a vital role in public safety and cyber security.

How necessary you think is to provide safe internet solutions in the age of cyber crimes?

Growth of connected devices means a larger attack surface for cyber criminals. As smart phone penetration grows and internet becomes increasingly accessible, providing safe internet becomes critical. Internet literacy rates varies with demographics of age, level of education and to some extent geographical location. Cyber criminals bank on unsuspecting victims to click on malicious links or provide confidential information. So it is crucial to provide safe and secure internet solutions are you enable the masses with smart technologies. 

With IoT, the network security market is growing at an impressive rate, where do you see the market moving in next 5 years?

IoT along with other trends such as cloud, virtualization, machine learning and software defined networking are driving the growth of network security market. Security technologies are increasingly delivered as virtualized products or through the cloud as a hosted service. There is enhanced focus on automated breach prevention for ease of use, single pane of glass management across deployed solutions that share intelligence and provide relevant analytics for actionable insights.  

How important do you think is to provide new age technology solutions for building a smart city?

Technology evolves at a rapid pace. Governing bodies and stakeholders must be able to leverage emerging technology platforms in an integrated manner to deliver better service and quality of life. A smart city should be built in a smart way, and equipped with leading new age solutions to keep pace with technology and stay competitive. 

How big you see SonicWall participation in managing the digital safety worldwide?

We live an increasingly complex, global and digitally connected world. Technology is both an enabler and an inhibitor as businesses, governments and citizens adapt to this rapidly changing environment. As the cyber arms race reaches new heights, the threat landscape will quickly follow suit. The number of threat vectors and insecurities within a typical organization or user are only growing and becoming more entrenched. This fact is compounded as hyper-connected cities are home to individuals with multiple devices and end-points. And each must be considered and protected. 

This is where automated real-time breach detection and prevention is key. As hackers turn to new and more sophisticated weapons, new cyber defenses must be added to the cyber security arsenal. SonicWall’s breach detection and prevention platform provides real-time cyber defense tuned to the specific needs of an organization. This next-generation approach is built on a cloud-based, multi-engine sandbox that captures malware in near real-time. It can be deployed for business data, mobile networks, email and secure communications (TLS/SSL).