The customer information and security landscape in India: Deepak Gupta, LoginRadius

Digital India is now a reality, and thanks to this initiative there are now millions of digital identities that have been created. However, due to this trend, there is now also an increased need to secure digital identities and educate organizations on the same. In an interview with DataQuest, Deepak Gupta, CTO and co-founder, LoginRadius talks about the CIAM landscape in India, awareness amongst organizations about privacy and data security, and what LoginRadius has to offer.

DataQuest: How is the customer information and security landscape shaping in India?

Deepak: It’s growing pretty significantly and in 10 years or I must say in the last couple of years because of the Government’s initiatives the whole country is coming over to the digital platform. So every company - government, healthcare, or financial - are getting into the digital ecosystem. They want to connect the consumers to digital media and don’t want it to be just on papers or phone calls. They want to give consumers a digital identity. So it is a pretty big thing for the country as currently there are nearly 5 billion digital identities at present and the same is expected to grow to 3 to 4 times in coming years.

DataQuest: How aware are customers of GDPR, data privacy and how important is their consent regarding their data?

Deepak: It’s very important that customers be aware of their privacy in digital data but sadly that's not the case. Especially Indian customers as they don’t know how their data is being used by companies as they provide their personal details while going through small events as well. Nowadays, education is going on for customers in order to explain to them how companies use their data. Lots of these privacy laws and compliances are coming such as GDPR; also, California is coming up with CCPA and India with DPA, which are considered to be good initiatives by the government because consumers might not be 100% educated. These rules will put restrictions on the company; for instance, if you’re collecting information of the users then you will have to keep that protected and distribution of that information wouldn’t be allowed.

DataQuest: How is LoginRadius securing customers’ trust?

Deepak: In the case of cloud, users are location independent; therefore, we use adaptive authentication as we track the location of accessing of user account and if any uncertain behavior is found, we force 2 Factor authentication in that place in order to prompt the user to verify their identity again and again through different modes like OTP, password, and passcodes.

DataQuest: How are you putting away micro breaches in your organization?

Deepak: As it’s a big challenge, we have security monitoring services, which log each and everything that comes in and goes out. We have a dedicated team to monitor these types of fraudulent activities and whenever someone tries to access our data, a system keeps it behind a multi-layer firewall that needs to be verified at multiple levels. We call this multi-factor authentication.

DataQuest: How is intelligence being used to keep the system safe?

Deepak: Let’s suppose we are getting some attacks from certain IPs, location, geography then we put more monitoring in place for these kind of attacks. So, we limit access to these zones and keep on verifying identities.

DataQuest: How are you using new age technologies to keep you ahead in the game?

Deepak: We are built on modern cloud-based technology, so we use hi-tech technologies in order to maintain the infrastructure. We use the latest technologies in each and every field such as security, development, DevOps, customer service, etc.

DataQuest: LoginRadius expansion plans for India and the challenges you expect

Deepak: We have a very aggressive target for the India market, and we’re going to double the headcount in a couple of years. So right now, we have 70-80 people in India but by the end of 2020, we will likely be 250-300. We’re also looking at increasing our customer base in India because we have seen tremendous growth in the market where companies, as well as the government, are going digital. Challenges will always exist and the first and foremost challenge is to build a good team that has a better understanding of cyber security and a good technical approach in this field whether it is in development, sales or marketing. Building a good team is the biggest challenge as the talent is limited here.