Any industry driven by technology initially experiences a curve of novelty and complexity before tending to become more standardized and simplified over time. The security sector appears to be moving in the opposite direction, as every year a profusion of new technological areas, products, and players appear, confusing the entire game. The result is that the market splits into a world of haves and have-nots, where the top 10% of customers have access to all resources while the remaining 90% find it difficult to understand what, why, and how technology works.
Sequretek was born in 2013 to bridge this gap, with a mission “to empower our customers’ growth without fear as their trusted security partner by simplifying security.” The key phrase here is “removing concern attached security threats linked to the digital transformation that has become important for our customer’s growth,” along with the promise that, as their trusted partner, we will make security simple and affordable for them.
In the fields of enterprise threat monitoring, visibility, incident response (Percept XDR), device security (Percept EDR), identity and access management, and governance, Sequretek provides end-to-end cyber security (Percept IGA). Sequretek’s own AI-driven Percept Cloud Security Platform includes all of these honorable mention products (CSP). The cybersecurity technology from Sequretek uses machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to thwart threat actors seeking to access customers’ systems via various touchpoints.
Below are highlights of the interview:
What makes SEQURETEK such a strong source of secure identity services?
Sequretek’s Percept IGA provides an easy-to-use, scalable, federated identity-based solution to meet identity and access governance, authentication, and administration needs for organizations. One of our customers manages over 1.75 lakh users across 600+ applications.
Percept IGA offers much more than a traditional IAM solution. It enables cloud-native zero-trust access across the enterprise, along with automated user life cycle management. This is available both on-premises and in the cloud (SaaS) offering. The product comprises of essential and pivotal features like automated access provisioning, access De-provisioning, granular User Access Recertification (UAR), Federated Multifactor Authentication (MFA) and Single Sign-On (SSO), all in one single product with a unified dashboard view and compliance reports.
What steps does the team take to determine the clients’ requirement before providing them services?
Being a mature Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) player in the industry, we have developed our processes to understand the requirements and check their feasibility. Sequretek, the OEM of the product, helps customers with implementation and management, as well as offers flexibility when it comes to integrating across applications, files, folders, structured and unstructured data, and more. This flexibility enables coverage of the complete enterprise through the IGA software, rather than covering bits and pieces while leaving a few legacy and next-gen technologies uncovered. As it is rightly said, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link!
We have a questionnaire that consists of a few mandatory elements. These questions need to be answered so that the requirement, use cases, and feasibility are validated.
What is the management’s view on the cybersecurity sector?
The cyber threat landscape is continuously evolving with more stealth and sophistication. Advanced threats such as targeted phishing attacks, ransomware, coin-miners, Trojans, zero-day attacks, and persistent threats, are today’s reality for threat management. Most attacks nowadays bear the imprints of an adversary nation-state’s sponsored espionage and long-term disruptions.Prevention, detection, response, and mitigation of these threats need the highest degree of automation, robust processes, and a well-trained team of security professionals.
What are the company’s key duties to the industry as a leading service provider?
We see three major challenges around cybersecurity that enterprises usually deal with, and we would like to help them with the same. The continuously evolving threat landscape is the very first of them. While the use of AI in detecting security issues is commonly known, it is also used by adversaries to create targeted and sophisticated attacks. More often than not, these attacks come from state sponsored adversaries, who have infinite resources at their disposal to execute these attacks (such as the attacks we saw between Iran and Armenia).
The second challenge is the technological shift that is happening at a rapid pace. Customers who purchased technologies 5 or 6 years ago have become vulnerable. Keeping pace with this ever-changing technology landscape is a big challenge. Thus, they have to keep updating and upgrading their technology environment to take care of vulnerabilities.
The third biggest challenge is people and raising awareness among them. Talent in cybersecurity who understands and manages this is very scarce.
What kind of work culture does SEQURETEK have?
Besides the open-door policy that we follow, it is important that employees perceive the organization as a fair employer who cares about them. Fairness in all our dealings, transparency in our processes, and empathy in our interactions. We at Sequretek strive to achieve the same through various policies, procedures, and formal-informal communications.
We work on overall employee development, both professional and personal. We stand by them in their hour of need and celebrate their success.
What is the company’s long-term vision?
Sequretek has been immensely focused on technology innovation and will continue to do so in the cybersecurity space. For Percept IGA, we are already working on capabilities like identity threat detection and response (ITDR), identity binding, and integrating AI-ML technologies for user behavior anomaly detection and prevention. These new functionalities will serve as market differentiators and create an extra competitive edge.
The transformation map (T-map) that we co-created with Stanford in their Stanford SEED Program, serves us as a guide to scale and scope our global reach, penetration, and market leadership.
About the Leader
Pankit Desai is a veteran of the IT industry with over 25 years of experience, including over a decade in global management roles. He is currently the co-founder and CEO at Sequretek, with responsibilities around business development, fund raising, and operations. Prior to Sequretek, he was with Rolta India as their President of International Operations, responsible for driving sales of their IT and IP-based businesses globally. He has spent over a decade in the US in roles ranging from global sales to operations and management at companies such as NTT Data, Intelligroup, and Wipro Technologies.
At Sequretek, he is proud of the growth that this team has been able to achieve within a short period of time. With product offerings that have found resonance with over 100 customers across industry segments, it has been able to grow at a CAGR of 50% over the past five years and has ambitions to create India’s first truly global security product and Solutions Company. The company’s success was boosted by two rounds of funding from two well-known Indian funds (GVFL and Unicorn Ventures), and it is now looking to raise another round of funding for global expansion.
Website: www.sequretek.com
