In India, Palo Alto Networks has almost tripled its headcount over the last 4-5 years, said Meerah Rajavel, CIO, of Palo Alto Networks. India is also among its fast-growing teams.

The company has over 1,000 employees in India, with 800 employees working in R&D across Bangalore, Gurugram, and Pune.

“We have our research and development, IT organization, and operations here. In some ways, India is self-sufficient in its own way, and all functions are here. We also have a significant amount of product innovation in India,” Rajavel added.

India is a fast-growing market, with manufacturing, healthcare, banking, and retail, being the conducive sectors where the company is seeing significant growth. However, the market itself is fast growing, the CIO shared.

“If you look at cybersecurity as an industry, initially, all these attack vectors started as fun. The first malware introduced was somebody playing a prank. But today, it is causing disruption. In the last five years, ransomware numbers have drastically gone from a few hundred thousand dollars to an average of $650,000 today. That’s a significant 23X times increase in the few years, and with that change in the landscape comes the vectors and the speed at which the breaches are happening.”

Digitization rate

The digitization rate in India is probably higher than in other countries, Swapna Bapat, Vice President & Managing Director, India and SAARC, Palo Alto Networks said. The rate of adoption of 4G, and UPI transactions are unheard of in other countries.

“In India, the growth for technology is massive, and hence cybersecurity. Our government’s focus on cybersecurity is high. There is the intelligence of saying we are digitizing, but not compromising on cybersecurity. In the public sector, we see interest from various PSUs and central government agencies on how they can fortify further. There’s also concentration on keeping data locally and we have enabled that through our solutions,” she said.

Alongside, adversaries also use AI in cybersecurity attacks like generating deepfakes and writing convincing phishing attack emails.

“When adversaries are using AI, we also do the same. We call it combating AI with AI, by using AI in our solutions to make security real-time, automated, comprehensive, and fully open. We truly believe AI will cause a tectonic shift, even if we are in the early stages,” Rajavel added.

Security deals with a lot of data, and machine learning and deep learning are good in pattern recognition. Deep learning can sense the similarities or whether an attack is new. If it is familiar with an attack, it can recognize the pattern to stop the attack. Gen AI can also make the job of the practitioners easy, she added.

Across its customers, Palo Alto Networks stops about 11.3 billion attacks every day, and sees about 2.3 million brand-new attacks daily, she said.