Interview: Karthik Anandarao, ManageEngine’s Chief Technical Evangelist

TECHx secured an exclusive interview with Karthik Anandarao, ManageEngine’s Chief Technical Evangelist for the Middle East to learn about their business continuity strategies, GITEX participation & road ahead for 2021.

TECHx: “Business Continuity” has been the most talked about for obvious reasons in the recent past. Please tell us how ManageEngine ensured its operations during the pandemic.

Karthik: At ManageEngine, we have been fortunate when it comes to remote working: We can operate from anywhere. Our products are hosted in the cloud or run in the cloud, so our employees and our customers alike can access our products even when our staff is working from home.

This has helped our personnel move to a work-from-home mode fairly seamlessly. The tools they need to do tasks like support, development and sales are all provided by cloud-based applications from us and our parent company, Zoho Corporation. Additionally, our data centers operate in primary and secondary modes so that all applications run with 99.999 percent availability.

But most importantly, we had a well-designed business continuity plan (BCP) that allowed us to continue business without interruption. Even with highly available systems, it is critical to have a BCP that outlines who needs to do what in a crisis.

TECHx: Please tell us about your participation at GITEX 2020.

Karthik: At GITEX this year, we were joined by our partner Elitser Technologies, and our main goal was to communicate our commitment to our customers in the region. At GITEX 2020, we showcased our entire suite of IT management and security solutions for the GCC market. It was a great opportunity for us to highlight our solutions that helped harden IT security like Desktop Central and Password Manager Pro, which can manage and secure endpoints and passwords, respectively.

During the pandemic, there has been a significant increase in sophisticated phishing attacks, and it has become more important than ever to monitor users who log on from multiple locations simultaneously or who access multiple resources in a short period.  Therefore, our new-gen SIEM solutions like Log360, which includes user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) capabilities, and our privileged access management solution, PAM360, are very useful for enterprises.  

With remote work and working from home becoming the new normal, our Remote Access Plus and Access Manager Plus solutions can help provide remote employees the access they need to exclusive information within the corporate network.

Besides, we also demonstrated how we can help businesses manage their IT from the cloud with our IT management and security solutions hosted on the Zoho platform.

TECHx: 2020 has shown us how fast technologies have been adapted. Now “Looking forward” to 2021, what is the road ahead?

Karthik: 2020 had been a challenging year not just for us but for everyone around the world. In terms of our business, we will continue to maintain our engagements with customers and partners in the region through training and certification programs, conducted virtually if needed. In 2021, we mainly intend to highlight our IT security solutions and to promote our cloud-based IT management tools in the region.

Meanwhile, businesses of every size and in every region will find that technology becomes a key underpinning in 2021. We look forward to investing heavily in bringing AI and ML capabilities to our tools and envision a fully integrated suite that will help our customers manage their users, endpoints, and infrastructure components holistically, from both operations and a security perspective.