How this enterprise security startup Sequretek is defying MNCs dominance in India

In the last four years or so, the security startup has come a long way to win the trust and faith of 50 – odd enterprise customers including some of India’s top organisations and businesses
Anand Naik and Pankit Desai, Co-founders of Sequretek (L-R)
Bangalore: Sequretek, a Mumbai based enterprise-security startup founded in November 2013 by two tech professionals Pankit Desai and former Symantec’s India and SAARC head Anand Naik has made early inroads into the MNCs-dominated security market in India.


HDFC Bank, IDBI Federal, HDFC Limited and NCDEX along with several other businesses from financial, retail, pharma and IT/ITeS sectors are on Sequretek’s growing clientele. However, this has happened largely because it was able to make all the right moves to stay relevant in the highly dynamic security market dominated by global security players.

In fact, right from having a strong workforce for building in-house security products to investing in security R&D and providing round the clock support and services to customers. Sequretek has tried to matched global security companies in almost all aspects and how the overall security business runs.

“We started in November 2013 and so now we are more than four years old. We have around 240 people divided into 4 major streams, including a 60 member development team, a 15 member malware and threat research team, a 45 member security operations team for 24x7 basis -security monitoring, and rest is the security services team for delivery services to customers,” says Pankit Desai, Co-founder and CEO – Sequretek.

Within the enterprise security, this startup focuses mainly on two areas -- the Endpoint/End-users and Devices. “On the product side, our focus primarily is on the endpoint/end-users because that’s where the biggest variability is and you can’t define who the user would or should be and therefore you will have various types of users,” adds Desai.

On the endpoint/end-users side, Sequretek has built a product called Avatar, which helps the organisations to have control over the user access. Basically, it provides controlled access to users and covers the area of access governance so organisations can govern the access to their employees or contractors.

On devices side, it has a product called Kawach, which is built around the next-generation endpoint detection, protection and response. It’s a single product that secures devices like desktops, laptops, mobile and others with the ability to play multiple roles like anti-virus software, advanced threat protection (ATP), data loss prevention (DLP), application white listing, device patching, mobile security and more.

Besides, Sequretek offers services including monitoring and managed security for customers. “On the services side, our biggest strength lies in the ability to monitor the customer’s environment on a 24x7 basis, collect security data from there and monitor by co-relating the information or threat feeds from 84 different sources globally,” explains Desai.

“And then we overlay that data with our technical ability to tell the customer if an attack has happened or likely to happen, what is the attack probability and so forth,” he further adds.

The customer’s environment could range from simple anti-virus software and firewalls to advance intrusion prevention and detection systems (IPS/IDS) to infrastructure elements like an active directory, load-balancers, emails and applications.

While, the security monitoring service is provided to customers on a 24x7 basis remotely, Sequretek’s managed security runs like an extended security arm of the customers.

“We do the managed security from the ground, where we actually run the security organisation of the customers. So we are like an extended arm of customers’ security leadership and work with their teams to ensure that devices, networks, systems and processes stay secure. We also help customers define their security processes, frameworks and audits,” informs Desai.

Interestingly, Sequretek powers its security products and services by leveraging the global threat feeds with its own ability to understand threats and attacks; and then back it with the strengths and expertise of in-house based security operations and malware research teams.

“We collect data from 84 different sources worldwide, including some from India; in fact, we are the only private sector company which has an agreement to get threat feeds from sources in government,” claims Desai.

Apart from collecting global threat feeds, Sequretek has internally developed mechanism to weed out spurious and duplicate feeds and then segregate and categorise them. Moreover, it has created and deployed its own honey-pots on networks to solicit attacks and understand people’s behaviour and response.

“Our 45 member security operations team works with a fair amount of customers. We collect roughly about 25 to 30 crore security alerts from these customers every day. Perhaps not all may be relevant, but quite a few would allow us to understand what these customers get exposed to on a daily basis and that will take as an input,” says Desai.

“And our malware research team takes all this information and analyse it to find what is relevant to our set of customers and to that specific industry. We, then, tell the customer what the issue is, with a particular malware that has entered its premises and how it can be stopped and dealt with,” further he explains.

In addition, customers are issued threat advisory on specific malware or botnets and targeted attacks on specific set of devices to help them take steps to beef-up the security and respond to threats in their organisations.

Despite being a startup, what makes Sequretek’s security offerings at par with the global security MNCs operating in the Indian market, according to Desai is the ability to identify patterns and behaviour change.

“And this ability is something integral to how we try to reduce dependency on multiple people or in other case agents in order to get all the intel out there. All security technologies that we have are architected around AI and Deep Learning,” states Desai.

Although the ability to understand those different threat feeds, patterns and behaviours is an exhaustive exercise, the startup is leveraging and relying on emerging technologies and mechanism such as Heuristic, behaviour analysis, multilayer AI algorithms and Deep Learning to get responses decentralise from the systems.

“For example, we monitor around 25 crore events per day, but using the technology we are able to convert that into say from 25 crore to about 1,500 alerts and a large part of reductive capability comes from Deep Learning and AI. We try to find out that this specific alert is genuine or not, otherwise you would require so many people,” observes Desai.

Being a pure play security startup, it also invests in security related R&D to improve capabilities and features of its products. For example, the products are made to work in the Indian conditions such as low bandwidth in a bid to support and protect customers in areas and locations which has low internet connectivity.

“Our aim is to monitor 50 crore events per day but will not add more people due to technology like AI and Deep Learning, “ concludes Desai.


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