Instasafe leading Cloud based Security-as-a-Service solution provider delivering comprehensive and Technologies, founded in Nov 2012, is a uncompromising protection to mobile and remote workers enabling them to safely and securely access enterprise apps, email and web from anywhere on any network.
Instasafe Secure Access (ISA) offers a hardware free, zero configuration, self-service style, fully redundant, Security-as-a-Service solution that can be deployed in minutes and scaled instantly as per customer requirement.
Instasafe Web Security (IWS) offers a hardware free, cloud based security solution that is easy to deploy and manage, is scalable and helps you control your bandwidth consumption while protecting your organisation from web threats.
Sandip’s Founding Story of Instasafe
Sandip Kumar Panda, with a BE (Comp Science & Engg) and an MBA from XIMB is the CEO of Instasafe and has been setting the vision and direction of the company since its inception. He has 10+ years of Business leadership experience with a deep understanding of the Information Security markets across geographies. Prior to founding Instasafe, Sandip was with BlueCoat Systems, leading India & SAARC markets. Later, at Symantec & WeP (Wipro), he led product businesses & multiple cross functional leadership roles.
With extensive domain and business knowledge in the field of security and networking, Sandip and the other co-founders realised that CIOs of today’s Enterprise & SMB IT organisations face many challenges in managing the Network Security of their distributed branch locations & remote mobile workers, like piling hardware, need for skilled manpower, increasing costs and missing features and updates.
Adding to the above infrastructure complexity is the fact that today mobility and the cloud are reshaping the way we work, unleashing new levels of productivity and freedom. Today, people are working from anywhere — inside and outside the Sandip & the founding team, felt that the rise of mobility & the cloud had created a space for newer security tools to emerge which could bring flexibility & simplicity to the remote mobile worker for the distributed enterprise. And therein was born the idea of Instasafe.
Instasafe was set up with the aim to provide simple and flexible security solutions for Enterprise & SMB organisations.
Key Strategies to be Best
As organisations move away from expensive hardware and move their infrastructure to the cloud, Cloud Security people will be much in demand. This is the right time to invest in acquiring cloud security skills to prepare for the high demand that is sure to follow.
Sandip’s own words for some of the key strategies that he has followed across his journey till now:
- Dream Big: My co-founders and I always believed that we are on the path to change the landscape of security in the country. We have always dreamed big in terms of capturing the market for cloud security and set our visions and our goals very high.
- Have Patience: Changing the landscape of an existing technology requires time, energy and effort. You need to have patience to help assuage the customer concerns and have them move away from status quo to experiment with a new method or technology.
- Build a Team: A start-up can work effectively only if there is a team that believes in the vision and works together. I am a firm believer in surrounding myself with people who are passionate and experts in their own fields. This leaves me with the time to focus on larger strategy issues.
- Simplify: Always simplify technology and solutions to the lowest denominator and use real life examples so that people understand what your product does very easily. The more simple you can make it, the easier it will be for customers to adopt the technology.
Challenge of “Convincing” for Transition
The biggest challenge that Instasafe has faced as a team across the last four and half years has been to convince customers to change their status quo from a hardware appliance based security infrastructure for secure access and web security to a cloud delivered security-as-a-service model. However, with the core beliefs of dreaming big, patience, simplification and a team; they have many enterprise customers today and are on a path of exponential growth over the next few years.
Vision and Transparency for Earning Customer Trust
When pitching a radically different and innovative technology, Sandip has always believed in a few core things to build a long-term relationship with customers:
- Sell the vision: Show the customers the big vision and the future shape of technology rather than selling your product on a feature/benefit model.
- Be transparent and ethical: Ensure that your interactions with the customer are transparent and ethical in terms of business dealings and technology readiness. Don’t overcommit and under-deliver
