Back in September last year, Ash Devata, VP and GM for Zero Trust and Duo at Cisco wrote about the expansion of our international footprint with the opening of data centers in Australia, Singapore, and Japan. Today, I am thrilled to add India to that list, exemplifying Duo's commitment in a key market, which couldn't have been better timed.

Local data centers help customers meet compliance and data localization requirements, which is becoming an increasingly important issue in India. As the National Law Review puts it '2021 was a blink-and-you-will-miss conveyor belt of activities' regarding privacy and data protection law related legal developments, including the issuance of new data privacy standards that explores how organizations establish, implement, maintain and continually improve their data privacy management systems.

Additionally, according to a survey by EY-Nasscom, one in every two Indian companies have accelerated their journey in cloud computing, which will inevitably increase the urgency for SaaS regulations in the region. A fact the Banking, Finance, Securities, and Insurance (BFSI) sector knows all too well, with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issuing a SaaS Circular on 'data localization requirements for financial sector organizations using cloud services' just two years ago.

Unsurprisingly, this kind of regulatory change has resulted in a large increase in demand for control over where cloud services are hosted. And because we take security very seriously, and protecting our customers is always a top priority, our data centers are ISO27001 and SOC2 compliant and maintain a 99.999% service availability goal.

As with our other local data centers, all functionality from Duo's zero trust platform including multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), VPN-less remote access, device trust and adaptive risk-based policies is available through these new data centers. And in the near future, passwordless authentication and other new features will be available in all of our data center locations concurrently. We expect this will be particularly beneficial to our clients in India, where we have noticed one of the largest increases in MFA technology use, with authentication volumes rising by 80% (YoY) as outlined in our Trusted Access Report 2021.

We can't wait to give this level of assurance and performance to our clients in such a strategically important region. Well done to everyone involved in making this happen.

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