Like most of his engineering peers, Abhishek Sharma started his professional journey with typical working engagements with a couple of IT majors. His story turned from mundane to interest in 2010 when he and a college batchmate and friend Tarun Wig came together to incept Innefu, a frontier tech firm built on some non-negotiable principles.
Mr. Sharma explains, “We wanted to create a product company. We observed that India is primarily a service-oriented country, especially in the IT sector. That didn’t excite us. We wanted to create things that drive value. Secondly, we wanted to work in niche technologies, tech that is fresh, exciting, and has ground-breaking potential. Keeping these principles in mind, we started Innefu — with a handful of people and operating out of an apartment.”
Innefu, which stands for “Innovating Future”, is a Research and Development organization powered by a closely knit team of some really brilliant young minds. Their product offerings belong to some of the coolest tech areas like Cyber Security, Data Analytics and Computer Vision. Innefu serves more than 100 customers across the globe, being the go-to guys for some of the hardest problems to solve amid the global crisis.
“We are proud to have a clientele ranging from one of the largest business conglomerates to multiple wings of government to military and defence. It has been a profound, intense and very rewarding experience.”
Abhishek Sharma, Co-founder and CTO, Innefu
How Abhishek Sharma’s Innefu Labs is solving the hardest enterprise problems in the current crisis
Innefu has been working with its clients to come up with unique offerings to help manage this crisis as best as they can. Sharma broadly explains the organization’s contribution amid the pandemic:
- Innefu’s Multi Factor Authentication product “AuthShield” is helping thousands of people connect securely and safely to their office infrastructures remotely. With work from home becoming the de facto norm, security has taken a front seat and that’s where AuthShield comes in. With its feature of biometric authentication, our clients just need to tap their finger to login to their remote digital assets very safely and securely.
- Prophecy, Innefu’s Data Analytical Platform, is being used by clients for studying critical analytical endpoints and coming up with “relevant” operational insights. Primarily driven by Artificial Intelligence, Prophecy does its best to understand the data across a wide range of datasets (internal and public) and paint a very relevant picture and come up with actionable predictive intelligence. Organizations are using it for multiple use cases ranging from Automation, Predictions, Operational Planning to even COVID-19 impact and analysis. Innefu created an app being successfully used by states for contact tracing, and then use analytics on the data for better decision making.
- The computer vision platform, AI Vision, is an Artificial Intelligence driven video analytics product with multiple features to help organizations better cope up with this crisis. It helps identifying people not wearing masks, gathering of crowds, social distancing violations, unauthorized accesses etc. The platform analyses CCTV/Camera feeds to help in running a safe and secure organization, two things that are of paramount importance in today’s crisis.
Watch: Innefu’s Prophecy platform
The Enterprise Future, enabled by AI
Sharma shares advice on how enterprises should leverage the power of data and AI.
“I personally believe that reading the current situation more accurately and holistically, getting your data in a proper form, and using advanced analytics leveraging AI is the key to survival, especially for the larger players.”
Abhishek Sharma, Co-founder and CTO, Innefu Labs
As per Sharma, organizations, notwithstanding which vertical they belong to, need a paradigm shift in the way they operate because nothing prepared them for this pandemic. In such a situation, traditional statistical analytics may not give organizations all the answers. The way forward, as per him, is to assess the situation and reassess the data one a continual basis “to understand what needs to be done today and what needs to be planned for tomorrow”. He says, “We have proven cases wherein we have leveraged our platform Prophecy to accomplish just that. Businesses need more holistic sales forecast and client segmentation. Medicine needs better research in fighting this deadly disease. Law Enforcement needs better strategic and operational awareness and planning to better cope up with this. BFSI needs better tools to understand frauds and even maybe digital identification. The list is endless but the answer is singular: AI. The answer lies in the data and how we look at it.”
Watch: Innefu’s AI Vision offering
Evolution of Information Security amid pandemic
With almost all critical operations gone online and more vulnerable to disruption due to cyber-attacks, Sharma believes Information Security has taken the center-stage. He elaborates, “The equation is fairly simple. Due to the pandemic, all the organizations have been forced to go into a remote work scenario. This means that digital assets of an organization are now being accessed by multiple individuals from (in a lot of cases) their own devices, which in most of the cases do not have enough security measures. Secondly these assets, which were mostly only available in your internal office secure network, are now available to the outside world. This poses a tremendous risk for the organization and a tremendous opportunity for a malicious hacker.”
He explains how even tools which have taken front seat like Zoom Meetings are not very secure and how we are learning about newer ways to exploit them on a daily basis. “The average cost of data breach in a country like USA is close to $8 Million. Hence, serious organizations are leaving no stone unturned in ensuring secure access to legitimate users. It is also widely understood that the user is in fact the weakest link in the security infrastructure. Even simple attacks like phishing have shown great impact. The spurt in phishing emails centered around Covid-19 have been able to compromise user accounts successfully. So end-user security offerings like Multi Factor Authentication are also getting great attention as per Sharma as they ensure that no one can access a user’s account illegitimately, even if they have access to their passwords. “Honestly, we have ourselves seen a lot of interest being generated in our Multi Factor Authentication product AuthShield.”
Watch: Innefu’s AuthShield Unified Authentication Platform
National Education Policy 2020: DKODING The 5+3+3+4 Of India’s Future Workforce
Kickstarting Business During The Pandemic — How To Capitalize On Uncertainty
How Ameyo Is Converting BPOs — From Cost Centers To Profit Centers
Rethink Impact: The Venture Firm Investing In Entrepreneurial Diversity During COVID-19
5G Circus: Ericsson and Nokia May Be The Biggest Beneficiaries Of UK’s Huawei Ban
