'It is a good time to be in India': Cisco India President Daisy Chittilapilly

Cisco, the worldwide leader in enterprise technology, which has been present in India for the past 27 years, believes India has been one of the key markets for the company. Cisco is one of the preferred security partners working across the spectrum in India, including enterprises, SMBs, governments and even startups; India is in the top 10 markets for the company globally, and will be in the top five markets by 2025. 

Daisy Chittilapilly, President, Cisco India & SAARC, told Business Today, “It has been a good time to be in India because we are the beneficiaries of the massiveness of digitisation. The bets we've placed on India as a market has worked. It is democratic across small and medium businesses, enterprises, public spaces and government. We are one of the fastest-growing markets for Cisco in Asia, Pacific, Japan, China and globally. And I guess that speaks to India's trust in us.”

The cybersecurity threat landscape in India and globally is expanding. India's threat has increased 3x in the last three years. And this landscape is expanding further and not much can be done about it. “But the only thing we can do is up our security resilience. And by that, we mean the ability to mitigate and prevent attacks as much as possible. When attacks do happen, then the ability to remediate in real-time and effectively and then, of course, come out more resilient post-attack. Earlier, we used to say before, during and after. This is still very valid even today,” says Chittilapilly.

To mitigate the threat landscape, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued a circular asking all government and private agencies, including internet service providers, social media platforms and data centres, to mandatorily report cyber security breach incidents to it within six hours of noticing them. This is one of the strictest thresholds globally (even the European Union mandates reporting in 72 hours).

Chittilapilly believes “The government, like we all at least at Cisco understand the philosophy, is really coming from a nation protection angle on this, particularly as we have seen the attack on both critical infrastructure and critical personnel have gone up. I was one of the early ones to call out that there is a targeted activity increase on India. So we understand the philosophy and the point of view from where the government's coming. But yes, the burden it will lay on enterprises is very large. Not all incidents are the same severity level. The ones who have broader consequences certainly deserve a lot of attention. That's where there is a divergence from when we seek clarity.”

In addition, with so much noise about the recession, Chittilapilly says there are clear stress pockets in the world due to the recession, and episodes like Silicon Valley Bank are not easy. And while there is additional scrutiny on the spending, the IT spending forecast in India or globally has remained solid and in the same range in the last 12 months. There may be pockets of volatility, as happens in the long-range outlook.

Cisco entered India in 1995. Since then, India has been the focal point of integration and continues to be a market in which Cisco is deeply invested in. The Centre in Bangalore is Cisco’s second largest centre outside the US. Cisco is also expanding its data centre footprint in India by investing in dedicated cloud infrastructure to bring security services to more customers in India.

Also read: Cisco invests in new data centre in Chennai for cloud-delivered security

Also read: 90% of organisations globally cannot detect, contain and resolve cyber threats within the first hour

Also read: MPW 2022: Daisy Chittilapilly, the agent of inclusion at CISCO