Accops Systems is one of the leading Make-in-India brands that helps businesses enable secure and compliant remote access to business applications from any device and network. With its workspace virtualization, access gateway and identity & access management solution suite, Accops acts as a single-stop shop for businesses to build a simple and integrated digital workspace for the future. Established in October 2012 and headquartered in Pune, India, Accops currently has a significant presence in over 10 countries, serving over 750 enterprises across multiple critical verticals, like BFSI, Healthcare, Pharma, Government, Defence, etc.
Recently, Accops completed a decade of its journey towards excellenceand celebrated the 10th anniversary of its inception. It marked the milestone by acknowledging the contributions of its most trusted partners at UTSAH 2022- Accops Partner Awards.
Celebrating Accops’ commitment to the partner community, as many as 21 channel partners and two major distributors — one from India and the other from Japan — were recognized in 14 different categories. Accops announced and felicitated the winners at an exciting and engaging evening in Mumbai.
Starting off the next decade of its journey towards newer heights, Accops thanks all of its 250+ partners spread across the globe and promises the same level of commitment and support that it has always extended to, what it considers, its extended families.
“Together, we intend to help our customers securely “Access” their “Operations” from anywhere, using any device, making the workspace more secure in the face of evolving cyber threats, said Mohan Bhat, CSO & Co-founder at Accops Systems Pvt. Ltd.
What is the trend in the market from remote work and cyber security perspective?
I will start with the people. The definition of people or workforce itself is not limited to employees these days. People are coming from the vendor ecosystem and customer ecosystem. Machines are now becoming part of the network of any organization. What we are looking at from the post-pandemic point of view is that the technology strategy has become far more inclusive. What was considered ‘nice to have’ from the work-from-anywhere standpoint is ‘a must have’ from an organization’s business continuity charter point of view.”
Having said that, when you accept the new reality, you must accept the challenges – especially, from a people experience standpoint and from technology execution and sustenance point.”
When we talk about technology execution and sustenance, from the information security point of view, what we are picking up clearly is that with the new normal coming in, there are people coming from the workplace of office, home, co-working spaces and even from coffee shops. We at Accops enable anyone to securely work from anywhere.
When the work is being enabled from any place and working with your own employees and vendors’ employees and customers, it means you expect a mix of managed and unmanaged devices. These unmanaged devices bring a lot of security challenges.
We also see that post-pandemic, the access to an application is no longer limited to the datacenters. A lot of applications are hosted and accessed in the SaaS model. It means folks do not need to come inside the corporate network, they can access these applications from anywhere. It entails added responsibility of offering seamless user experience with the same security principles, which guide the entire organization. From Accops’ standpoint, our simple approach to resolve some of these problems is to offer the zero-trust framework.
What is your perception of insider threat?
Insider threat is a major concern these days. We look at insider threats from two dimensions – intended and unintended.
The first one is about a disgruntled employee who wants to damage the organization deliberately. The second one is the skilling issue. The employees who are not skilled enough unknowingly do damage to the company by leaking information.
In both cases, blunders are happening. Of course, there is a lot of social engineering these days on the employees to reveal credentials. However, the average cost of remediation per insider theft for 2022 was US$ 800,000. A very large customer in north India which suffered from an insider threat paid almost US$500000 as remediation.
So, insider threat would remain a major concern for every organization.
We are also seeing external threats, including phishing, ransomware, DDoS attacks, etc., becoming responsible for exploiting internal information.
Our recommendation to deal with these threats is to have the asecurity posture which is right sizing tools and skills.
What are your future recommendations for cyber security?
From Accops’ standpoint, we recommend 5 principles. Our recommendation starts with Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). The future belongs to DaaS, where the minimum footprint of data is seen at the endpoint. That also comes with an added layer of protection, and it becomes very easy to manage systems cutting across all the layers. It also simplifies IT admins’ responsibilities. DaaS also contributes to securing organizations from risk, which comes from an endpoint.
After DaaS, we recommend customers to embrace a zero-trust access framework. It ensures that the identity security and validation of users are never compromised. Of course, it continues to abide by the AAA framework that are Authorization, Authentication, and Accounting which. ensures that the users coming into the network with risk cannot affect the corporate network.
Then we look at converged IAM (Identity and Access Management). Accops has defense-in-depth multi-layered security approach in our converged IAM. We go beyond multi-factor and SSO. Today, we offer biometric authentication, where we have an added element of facial recognition of the users.
The fourth principle is the consolidation of vendors. It ensures the cost of operation comes down. And the complexity is reduced. So, we believe that the top decision makers’ agenda should have a high priority for vendor consolidation. We at Accops are very relevant to the vendor consolidation principle. Our products’ suite is very integrated as we offer digital workspace having everything – right from VDI to ZTNA to Conversed IAM, etc.
Last but not the least is AI. AI is contributing significantly to the economic progress of the world. Machines are becoming more and more part of our daily lives. We have already seen drones becoming part of homeland security in India. So, most of the states today have drones with their police departments. There are going to be more use cases of drones, but there will also be use cases of many other machines trying to make our lives more productive and efficient. So, AI would play a very important role in the future with people and machines co-existing.
What is the value proposition of Accops?
We always look at the problem statement of the customers. Here is an example of one of our clients providing DTH services . We helped this client contact center save to the tune of 60% of operational costs by enabling remote work along with a Zero-trust network. So, the first and foremost thing is that we want to solve customers’ business challenges, and as a part of this, we end up selling them technology.
Secondly, compared to many of our competitors, who sell point solutions with specialization in one area only, Accops. brings an integrated product suite with VDI to ZTNA to IAM and endpoint devices too, as differentiation. We help customers to reduce complexity within their networks and the cost of operation.
We use a frugal engineering framework to develop our products. Therefore, we can evaluate customers’ requirements rapidly and come up with new products features quickly.
The winners of Accops Partner Awards 2022
Award Category | Partner Name |
Partner of the Year Award | F5 Techno Solutions Pvt. Ltd |
Enterprise Partner of the Year Award | Team Computers Pvt. Ltd |
Strategic Acquisition of the Year Award | Micropoint Computers Pvt. Ltd |
Government & PSU Partner of the Year Award | Inspirisys Solutions Ltd |
Sales Accelerator of the Year Award | PSR-IT Services Pvt. Ltd Network Techlab (India) Pvt. Ltd Ashtech Infotech (India) Pvt. Ltd Arrow PC Network Pvt. Ltd |
Customer Excellence Award | Vinca Cyber Pvt. Ltd Nanjgel Solutions Pvt. Ltd Orbit Techsol Pvt. Ltd Regent Digitech Pvt. Ltd |
Recurring Value Creator of the Year | Nanjgel Solutions Pvt. Ltd |
Technology Excellence Award – VDI | Team Computers Pvt. Ltd |
Technology Excellence Award – Access Gateway | I T Solutions India Pvt. Ltd |
Best Cloud Enabler of the Year Award | ITCG Solutions Pvt. Ltd |
Social Media Champion of the Year Award | Touchline Technologies Pvt. Ltd Bulwark Technologies LLC Vion-Consulting Pvt. Ltd |
Emerging Partner of the Year | SISL Infotech Pvt. Ltd Pentagon Network Solutions Pvt. Ltd Ninth Dimension IT Solutions Pvt. Ltd Softcell Technologies Global Pvt. Ltd |
Accops Value-added Distributor of the Year | Beetel Teletech Limited |
Global Partner of the Year | Accops and Zevoke Technologies Inc |