Trellix's vision for India's evolving security landscape

A cyber-attack campaign that once took months of concentrated coding can now be assembled in hours. For enterprises and governments, that has changed the security question from ‘which product?’ to ‘which partner can keep pace?’ Trellix, the global cyber-security company, is positioning itself as that partner, as India is central to the plan.

Trellix was established in January 2022, when McAfee Enterprise and FireEye came together under Symphony Technology Group.

The company describes its mission as intelligence-led cyber resilience. It operationalises threat intelligence and automates AI-powered detection and response, so organisations can reduce risk, make security teams more efficient and ensure business continuity.

The depth behind that promise is considerable. The Trellix Advanced Research Centre tracks more than 5,500 threat campaigns and over 500 threat groups. Every day, it analyses two billion email samples, more than 100 million attachments and over 800 million URLs, backed by 20-plus intelligence partnerships. Trellix Wise, launched in May 2024, uses AI to cut investigation time from over an hour to an average of 11 minutes, an 82 per cent reduction in mean time to investigate.

The integration of the two legacy companies is now complete, affirms Ganesh Iyer, MD, India & SAARC. Customers may still remember the FireEye and McAfee names, he notes, but every product on offer is now Trellix, drawing on the best of both lineages. The next step, over the coming 12-18 months, is an agentic approach and a threat intelligence service built around what he calls operational intelligence. A customer who spots an anomaly can query the platform and learn whether it is part of a wider campaign, where else it has been seen and how to strengthen defences. The insight is drawn from anonymised telemetry gathered globally over a decade or more. “We are taking the intelligence to the data,” Iyer says, so customers do not have to send their own data to Trellix.

India is where much of this work happens. The country is Trellix’s Innovation Hub, with engineering centres in Bengaluru and Pune and sales offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. About 70 per cent of the company’s global engineering workforce and 45 per cent of all employees are based in India and Trellix has hired more than 300 people a year in the country for the past four years. It also takes part in the India Apprenticeship Programme and the Prime Minister’s Internship Scheme.

The business is growing in step. Trellix reports 32 per cent year-over-year growth in India and says it is trusted by 80 per cent of the country’s National Critical Infrastructure and Defence organisations. India-based data centres support data localisation requirements. Across Asia-Pacific, 70 per cent of the company’s business comes from public and government, banking and financial services, and critical infrastructure and the region grew 40 per cent in the first quarter.

Closing the gap

Iyer sees the market’s evolution plainly. India once trailed the US by 12-18 months in adopting new technology but, in cyber-security, the gap has largely closed. What sets India apart is scale. Its banks, government systems and national-scale platforms present an attack surface that Iyer calls ‘mind-boggling’ in volume. He is equally candid about customer behaviour. Large Indian organisations still prefer several vendors to avoid a single point of failure, even as the industry moves towards platforms.

AI is the backdrop to all of it. “What used to take months of concentrated coding to bring a campaign together has come down to days, and then to hours,” Iyer says. Attackers and defenders now use the same tools, which makes AI-versus-AI contests inevitable. For him, the conversation has moved beyond products to a more basic question: whether a customer’s partner can use AI well enough to meet AI-driven threats. That is the bet Trellix is making in India. As the business grows, Iyer says, the company’s investment in the country will grow with it.

For Trellix, therefore, India is evolving from a large growth market into a strategic pillar of its global operations. With a substantial share of its engineering talent based here, the country is already contributing to products and capabilities deployed worldwide. The opportunity, Iyer believes, lies in building on this foundation as demand for advanced cybersecurity solutions accelerates. The company’s approach is closely linked to its business trajectory: as India grows in importance for Trellix, so will its investments in talent, technology and innovation. In that sense, India’s role is no longer merely about serving a market, but helping shape the company’s global future.