This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 11, 2017 - September 17, 2017

“ACTUALLY, I never thought about Malaysia. I’m sorry, I don’t want to offend you [but] it’s not a big country, so we didn’t think about it,” Natalya Kaspersky confesses when asked why InfoWatch Group chose Malaysia.

What changed her mind was a series of incidents that started with the unfortunate demise of a Kaspersky Lab distributor in Malaysia. “His widow contacted me after the company ran into some issues with Kaspersky Lab, but it was three years after I had left it, so I couldn’t help her. Instead, I asked her, ‘Why not try InfoWatch?’”

However, complications with the new partnership arose, which resulted in an impasse that was only broken when the one-year distributorship agreement ended.

“We already had the customers, but the distribution agreement had expired. So we decided to open the channel with other partners, hire a couple of people. So now we’re establishing a proper office in Malaysia. Someone opened a door for us and we looked through the door and ...‘Oh, it’s a nice country’. When you look at all the calculations from the analytical guys — it’s a small market. But it doesn’t work this way. Actually, life is most sophisticated [here] and [there are] plenty of opportunities. We found good opportunities in Malaysia and I’m very excited,” says Kaspersky.

What won her over was the fact that Malaysia is open to technologists, she says, with a government that takes cyber security seriously. “I’d say generally in Southeast Asia, the relationship with security is careless. People are more engaged with new devices, they’re more enthusiastic about those things, [but] about security, not at all. But Malaysia is different. It has a cyber security committee, with a very big government part that takes care of cyber security. It’s really a country that’s good [for us] to start off [from],” she says.

InfoWatch’s new regional office in Menara Ilham, Kuala Lumpur, opened its doors on Sept 8. Kaspersky envisions it as the company’s base to springboard into the rest of Southeast Asia, which is a priority market for them. “We already have some clients in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka,” she adds.

Once a small Kaspersky Lab project, InfoWatch is now a privately-held company that delivers software solutions for companies to monitor and manage information flow.

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