Interaction - Akshat Jain, Co-founder and CTO, Cyware

Akshat Jain, Co-founder and CTO, Cyware talks to us on the Engineers' Day about the growing segment of SaaS in the IT industry

What software and as-a-service platform segments are providing the best business growth in 2022?

Akshat Jain - Over the past few years, we have witnessed a massive growth in SaaS solutions. Conducting business operations across geographies through a distributed workforce in a secure and efficient manner has become the key challenge faced by organisations. To overcome the gauntlet thrown down by the changing technology landscape, various SaaS innovations have emerged in the areas of cybersecurity, healthcare, cloud services, remote learning, online collaboration, e-commerce, and others. Organisations are recognising the need to build a more dynamic and resilient presence in the cyberspace, amidst growing risks. Innovators are enabling this transformation through new collaborative and automation-driven technologies to help organisations grow faster and protect their data, assets, employees, and customers. SaaS solutions have become the go-to avenue for pushing forward with digital transformation initiatives while reducing the reliance on legacy and on-premise solutions as part of the technology infrastructure powering many critical industries.

What are the reasons for their providing the best business growth?

Akshat Jain - SaaS use cases have come way beyond just core engineering, marketing and sales applications as businesses are evolving their internal processes to become digital-native across a wide variety of tasks. Some of the main reasons behind the immense growth of SaaS applications include their seamless availability, simplicity, and flexibility. To solve present day challenges faced by businesses, new models of software-led innovation are rapidly gaining adoption, such as the integration of various IT and security technologies to transform security posture and improve cyber resilience. SaaS applications provide fast-growing organisations the opportunity to build out their IT infrastructure with greater ease, agility, and cost-effectiveness. This unlocks opportunities for scaling up business operations at a rapid pace without going through long procurement and deployment cycles.

Do you think these growth opportunities are going to sustain or is this situation going to change?

Akshat Jain - There is no reason, whatsoever, to believe that these growth opportunities will not sustain. Going by Gartner’s forecast for 2023, global enterprise software spending is expected to reach a mammoth $750 billion. SaaS cloud alone will reach over $208 billion. This rise can be attributed to organisations implementing cloud-based microservices infrastructure to break down chunky, inflexible applications into flexible ones. At Cyware, we have engineered our cloud-based cybersecurity solutions from the ground up to leverage a microservices-based architecture and design to meet the growing needs of our clients when it comes to scale and performance both. Moreover, organisations in both the public and private sectors are looking for innovative solutions to accelerate and expand the delivery of their services to the end users and SaaS applications fit the bill perfectly. The pressing need for collaboration and data-driven business processes across various industries will further boost the growth of SaaS applications in the coming years.

What are the challenges in these growth-oriented segments?

Akshat Jain - No segment is bereft of challenges and the same can be applied to SaaS. Most challenges come in the form of integration problems linked to hybrid infrastructure. However, one of the biggest challenges that needs to be addressed is security. As organizations race to convert to SaaS models, it is inevitable that they will confront the challenges of security misconfigurations, access management, regulatory compliance, data security, privacy, and cyber incident response and recovery, among others.

We frequently come across news of data breaches stemming from unsecured cloud storage, along with various kinds of sophisticated cyber threats, such as malware, vulnerabilities, and threat actors, impacting SaaS vendors and their customers and causing the subsequent loss of valuable information and operational disruption. We have to take into consideration that conventional cybersecurity measures that were formulated in the era of legacy, on-premise infrastructures are not enough to thwart such risks. To forge a way forward, all SaaS vendors, partners, and their customers will have to leverage threat intelligence sharing across organisations and low-code security automation to create proactive threat response capabilities. Furthermore, let’s not forget the importance of cyber fusion to eliminate security silos, improve efficiency through intelligence and automation-driven processes, and build more resilient collaboration-driven cybersecurity strategies for the future.

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