We live in the age of, and pretty much, live through devices. Phones, laptops, tablets, smart watches, smart TVs and other home appliances.. the list is endless. As we hurtle into a hyper digital world, the desire to have one single device to manage all other devices seems like a pipedream. To be fair, most high-end smartphones do manage to achieve a fair amount of interconnectedness but this isn't a ubiquitous way of life just yet. While hyper digitisation has more advantages than one can count, there are some drawbacks to them as well - one being security. The pandemic year was one where an inordinately high number of cyber incidents took place around the globe - understandably since workforces went remote with very little time to prepare for integration or security measures. Reliance on home networks without secure firewalls and an unprecedented increase in online transactions catapulted the threat incidence rate. At a time like this, wouldn't it be simpler if we all had one single product to manage the security of all our devices? 

Karmesh Gupta and his cousin Praveen had this very thought back in 2017 when they started WiJungle. "We wanted to transform the cyber security architecture from distributed to a unified one. We wanted organizations to deploy a single product to protect all the three essential spaces namely - office, remote workforce and cloud, rather than implanting multiple standalone products, which add to operational burdens and increase investment. Unified security solutions marks a new era in cybersecurity," says Gupta, who claims that WiJungle was an accidental startup that came into existence after two of his previous attempts at entrepreneurship failed. 

Gupta long harboured plans of becoming an entrepreneur. He was particularly interested in cybersecurity so he did a course in ethical hacking, following it up with a short stint at cyber security company Lucideus. He started HttpCart Technologies, with the endeavour of providing free WiFi with no limit on time or data, becoming the first private Indian company to do so. During its implementation, vendors suggested to Gupta that they deploy two different products - a Unified Threat Management (UTM) system and a AAA/Hotspot Gateway for authentication. Since UTM, by default, offered nearly 70% of the functionalities that AAA did, an additional AAA product seemed futile. Investing in two similar products would obviously increase compliance, expenditure and systems complexity.

So, Gupta decided to serve multiple security capabilities through a single product, which were earlier getting fulfilled via stand-alone silos. There are five strong benefits behind adopting a unified architecture and managing assets with a single product.

• Costs go down and further turn the paying model from capex to opex.
• Reduces operational burdens.
• Offers industry specialized capabilities
• Synchronizes security to enable proactive defence
• A pool of third-party services to integrate per individual needs

WiJungle provides the capabilities of Network Firewall, Web Application Firewall, SD-WAN, DLP, Hotspot Gateway, Vulnerability Assessment etc. all through a single window. The startup offers 42+ different product models to cater the requirements of organizations of different scale and industries. Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning-enabled appliances help businesses manage and safeguard their entire network through a single window. In addition, WiJungle is leveraging AI for behavioural analysis to detect unknown threats. The company works with a range of clients in enterprise software, retail, hospitality, healthcare, education and transport among others. 

As digital interconnectedness and reliance on Internet-based services grows, organisations do face more difficult and complex challenges in cybersecurity. "In the current time, I particularly feel that data breaches and ransomware are one of the major concerns for all scale of organizations. In my understanding, modern tech products are quite powerful to combat these challenges provided they have been tightly implemented. Most of the time, products are not configured up to the mark and thus provides room for an intruder to play around." While sectors like BFSI, large IT/ITES/BPOs, media and manufacturing companies possess mature cyber infrastructure, upcoming sectors like education and healthcare that have witnessed a windfall since early 2020 need to now focus on ramping up their cyber defences, adds Gupta. 

The need for easy to install and integrated services was especially heightened during COVID19. In May 2020, MeitY, DSCI announced five Indian startups that companies should work with for secure WFH solutions, and one of them was WiJungle, which was offering network data leak prevention, malware protection, cloud sandboxing and zero day protection, Granular access control to network resources, Virtual private network (VPN) for internet protocol security (IPsec) and secure sockets layer (SSL), IPSec and more. 

WiJungle has won several accolades to date - Most Innovative Product of The Year by DSCI in 2018, 20 Most Promising Enterprise Security Providers by CIOReview India, Niti Aayog supported Aegis Graham Bell Award, Frost & Sullivan's MEASA New Product Innovation Award of the Year 2019 - Cybersecurity and Highest Rated Vendor of Gartner's Network Firewall Market. WiJungle's product is also recognised by the Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade (DIPP) for product and service innovation. In 2021, Gupta is hopeful of expanding the company's presence in South Asia, Africa and Middle East, and come up with an offering in cloud form factor to support hybrid use cases.