Electronics Era: As CTO of AnexGATE and Founder of NetSense CyberSecurity, how do you define your core vision for advancing cybersecurity in an increasingly interconnected world?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: There is no single right answer here, cybersecurity depends on context, if we are working with a company that works completely remotely, the challenges are very different when compared to a in-office security environment. With higher degrees of interconnect, the focus moves to detect things in the first mile. The closer the security control is to the first mile, the more effective it can be. For companies that use multiple SaaS suites, the browser becomes the first mile. For companies that work with hosted applications, web security becomes more important. Our vision is to be able to do all the above in one vertically integrated stack so that we cover as many context edge cases as possible.
Electronics Era: How has the cybersecurity threat landscape evolved in recent years, particularly with the rise of AI-driven attacks and sophisticated threat actors?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: AI has removed the difficulty that existed in creating fakes, whether you talk about images or websites, Phishing is the obvious beneficiary. If a fake website can replicate the real one with high accuracy without requiring technical skill by the person but by using AI, that poses a real challenge. Responding to threats always requires two facets, the technology facet is already being strengthened by using AI for detection. The human facet is what requires more work. A person who follows training and advisories given by law enforcement can spot most scams and attacks, from digital arrest to phishing pages. Most threat actors targeting consumers are not using AI to do high tech exploits, but to catch the low hanging fruit of human fear and predisposition to acting irrationally under stress.
Electronics Era: How next-generation infrastructure is evolving in response to AI and data growth?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: For now, it’s the age of hyperscalers. Sooner or later AI compute and inference will need to move closer to the edge but it does not seem sustainable to build at current costs. Models will need to be tailored to specific use cases, data will need to be stored locally, and served faster so that more real time decisions can be made. Most networking and security functions still use AI passively, not in the line of packet level decision making, that seems to be the next frontier.
Electronics Era: According to you how should enterprises balance between proactive threat intelligence and reactive incident response strategies?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: Always give more emphasis to proactive threat intelligence, a false positive is better than a true positive. Given an enterprises resources, it’s always better overall to triage a false positive than react to a true positive threat detection. This is somewhat of a contrary opinion, because false positives are looked at as a sign of product failure, however, if your goal is to maintain a higher security posture, I would rather have a false positive and use a combination of human + AI to triage it rather than have a true positive and enter a crisis management situation.
Electronics Era: AnexGATE focuses on next-generation networking solutions. How do you see the convergence of networking and security shaping enterprise IT infrastructure?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: The convergence of networking and security began a very long time back. One major aspect that has always been a hindrance is lack of interoperability. Equipment from multiple vendors is never able to give the combined security posture that a single vendor can provide. This is something that I hope I can change. Secondly, CISOs and CTOs are no longer working in silos. This is one of the welcome changes, enterprise IT decisions are now being taken jointly, so networking functions and security functions cannot be done separate, they are now done together with products doing both. A switch is no longer fulfilling networking functions; it also works with a NAC for security controls. The same happens with Access Points, Firewalls, etc. To put it simply, enterprise IT now has a theatre command for cybersecurity with the two chiefs as its heads. The sooner an enterprise realizes this, the better it is.
Electronics Era: What role do Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architectures play in modern cybersecurity frameworks?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: SDN never really took the shape that it was originally meant to take. SDN provided a vision for commodity hardware, this then pivoted to ASIC based hardware which brought back vendor dependencies. Most medium enterprises today still do not embrace SDN, its smaller cousin SD-WAN is more widely adopted due to lesser complexity and more direct and quick value addition. SASE on the other hand has been a game changer for the remote workforce and the cloud first enterprises who really struggled with traditional firewalls and remote workers. SD-WAN and SASE put together have been the go to enterprise IT stacks for a hybrid organization. Most SASE solutions will now need to also move from the identity based architecture to accommodate AI agents and secure them differently.
Electronics Era: How is AI/ML transforming cybersecurity operations, particularly in threat detection and anomaly identification?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: AI is great at finding one needle from hundreds of haystacks which is the hallmark of anomaly detection. At NetSense, we have had great success with using XGBoost based models for threat detection with domain names and traffic flows. AI Agents have been deployed for more than a year to augment existing data leak prevention solutions and for malware analysis. Our malware analysis AI agents did much better at reverse engineering android and windows-based malware and create patterns for detection more efficiently than a human could do. Though there are some challenges especially when malware is packed but it’s a very good start.
Electronics Era: With the rapid adoption of IIoT and smart manufacturing, what are the biggest security challenges in OT environments?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: OT environments completely shift the playbook compared to IT. Since reliability is sacrosanct, passive controls and out of line monitoring have been the gold standard. The biggest security challenges in modern IIoT environments come from providing secure wireless links, ensuring DDoS does not disrupt production lines and most importantly, that equipment can be securely and remotely monitored and managed. Because of this, dark factories will greatly depend upon secure remote monitoring and management. Some aspects of Zero Trust Network Access will need to be borrowed and adapted to these environments.
Electronics Era: How do you assess India’s current cybersecurity readiness in comparison to global standards?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: We are doing better than we were pre-covid. India always shines at the time of a crisis. From a policy point of view the DPDP is one of the best cybersecurity frameworks for citizens. However, we need to add a lot more focus on developing indigenous security technologies. Building security products is not the same as building software. The knowledge and technical know-how is a lot more challenging, with most aspects requiring months to figure out. At NetSense we have been down many rabbit holes. Unless we have the core IP that knows how to forward packets and securely communicate, it will remain a weak link. Thirdly, the government has laid a good foundation in terms of certifications and product evaluations. This now needs to get implemented in the true spirit for Make in India to shine.
Electronics Era: What impact will technologies like quantum computing have on current encryption and cybersecurity practices?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: Quantum Computing and more importantly cryptographic quantum technologies are going to be a reality soon, it is just a matter of time. Post Quantum Crypto (PQC) readiness is paramount here, organizations working in sensitive domains need to be aware of harvest now-decrypt later attacks. The only way to prevent them is to migrate to PQC compliant cipher suits and security technologies. The government has a large role to play here, it has already set a deadline for 2029 to migrate all critical infrastructure. The more this can be accelerated, the better.
Electronics Era: What differentiates AnexGATE’s solutions in the competitive cybersecurity and networking market?
Hitesh Dharmdasani: We are on track to be the only Indian company that operates from Agent to Network to AI to Cloud. This goes back to the earlier point about convergence of networking and security. We are looking at it as a combination of networking, security, manageability and productivity (this is also our tagline). The second half of the picture comes from users, the first half comes from the real equipment and hardware, unless they both work in absolute coherence, IT security remains a challenge as risk remains high and usability of the entire solution remains low. Our goal is to offer one cohesive solution that works for a combination of Datacenter, Head Office, Branch Offices, Remote Workforce and AI Agents with the same security assurance.
