For years, India has been central to how Talanos delivers its portfolio of cyber security services. Our capability has been built, in part, with Indian talent. Our teams are distributed across the UK, South Africa and India, and that model has allowed us to scale in a way that a purely UK-based operation couldn't.
What we haven't done, until now, is sell into India directly.
That changes this year. Together with Naveen Sharma - our CTO and co-director of the Indian business, who has led our delivery operations from India for years - we have made the decision to engage with Indian customers directly, starting with the public sector and expanding from there.
Why now?
In November 2025, Naveen and I joined the UK Department for Business and Trade on a Homeland Security trade mission to South India, travelling through Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad in the weeks following the signing of the UK–India Free Trade Agreement.
What we saw was not a market at the beginning of a journey. It was a market mid-stride.
The pace of digital infrastructure investment is significant and deliberate - visible in transport, in public services, in the integration of systems like Aadhaar into everyday processes. Alongside this, there is a growing, confident middle class choosing to build and consume within India rather than looking outward. Domestic businesses in logistics and consumer services are operating at a standard that challenges global competitors in terms of speed, cost and breadth.
This is not incremental development. It has the feel of a market that has made a decision about where it is going.
What that means for cyber security
Rapid digital growth creates rapid exposure. As systems become more interconnected and more critical, the attack surface expands, and often it expands faster than the controls designed to manage it.
Cybercrime doesn't respect that gap. The infrastructure used by criminal groups -forums, encrypted platforms, anonymised networks - is inherently global. Organisations that only monitor their own environment are, increasingly, working with an incomplete picture. The indicators of risk are often sitting somewhere else entirely.
This is the problem our Cerberus capability is built to address. It provides controlled access to the environments where that activity originates - hidden forums, dark web infrastructure, criminal networks - along with the ability to search, analyse and extract information in a way that can be used operationally, including in investigative and evidential contexts.
We have been deploying this capability with law enforcement, and public and private sector organisations in other regions for some time. The trials we have run in India over the past months suggest the need here is at least as acute.
Why Talanos?
This is a fair question, and one worth answering directly.
India has no shortage of cybersecurity providers - global firms with significant resources, and a growing number of strong domestic players who understand the market far better than any new entrant could.
What we offer is different in a deliberate way. We have developed, and continue to operate, a capability that provides genuine visibility into threat environments that most organisations - and many providers - cannot reach. That capability is not theoretical. It is operationally deployed, it has been used in evidential contexts, and the team behind it includes people who have been working in this space for years.
Naveen's position matters here too. He is not a UK executive parachuted into a new geography. He has been building and running delivery operations in India throughout his time at Talanos. That context - the relationships, the understanding of how organisations here work, the credibility that comes from being part of the market rather than visiting it – is a large part of what we're bringing.
We are not the right fit for every organisation. But for public sector and law enforcement teams that need to understand threats operating beyond their immediate environment, we know we have something genuinely useful to offer.
What comes next
Naveen will be returning to India in May, along with our Head of Security Operations, Jan Lundall, to continue the conversations we began in November - and to start new ones.
If you are working in law enforcement, the public sector, or a private sector organisation dealing with threats that originate from outside your own environment, we would welcome a conversation. Whether you are in the early stages of thinking through the problem or further along, we are happy to share what we have seen working in other contexts and to understand whether it is relevant to yours.
You can reach us via our website.
