MAM
GoDaddy is boosting digital skills development in India: Nikhil Arora
NEW DELHI: Covid2019 has impacted every part of our lives, from financial spending to the places we can go to. Running a sustainable business has emerged as one of the bigger challenges that this crisis has brought to the forefront. It has now become crucial for businesses to adapt to the current situation and recharge their foundations to help survive in these challenging times.
Amidst this pandemic, GoDaddy has witnessed an increase in the customer footfall, as companies revamp their strategies, move online, and find unconventional ways to communicate with their customers.
In lieu of the situation and looking at the current need and demand from small-scale ventures, GoDaddy launched a global #OpenWeStand campaign, a virtual movement encouraging everyone to share products and services, learnings, and insights to help small businesses survive and thrive.
According to GoDaddy Inc, VP and MD India Nikhil Arora, owing to the rising need for digital skills, the brand set up the first online educational platform – GoDaddy Academy, offering basic technology and online business training, free of cost. “We also joined forces with Ketto, India’s leading crowdfunding platform, helping local entrepreneurs and small business owners to start fundraisers for free and raise money to pay off any business debts, employee salaries, etc. during the crisis.”
GoDaddy Academy is an online education platform in India, where people (with varied levels of technical expertise) can come and take certification courses to learn online business and technology skills. After receiving a positive response on GoDaddy Academy, the brand has also partnered with EduSkill, a non-profit social enterprise designed to help boost digital skills development in India. With this partnership, it aims to create a talent pool of over 50,000 skilled youth in the country, by offering GoDaddy Academy courses to more than 2000 educators across eduskills’ 800+ partner universities and engineering colleges in India for a period of one year.
The brand is constantly working towards helping small enterprises from tier-2 and tier-3 cities to come and grow online. Arora shared, “We are hopeful and excited to be here in this market at the time to witness the tremendous internet boom and help educate and enable small businesses to realize the benefits of being online. We have penetrations in all markets across India but are strongly focused on bringing small businesses and local entrepreneurs from tier cities, which form 50 per cent of our India customer base.”
With the objective of raising awareness among the SMEs community, the brand recently kicked off the second phase of its Indian marketing campaign – Bijness Bhai. The initiative continues the focus on encouraging small businesses in India to build an integrated online business. The ad campaign is available in seven Indian languages, including Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, to help spread the message to Indian small business owners and entrepreneurs across multiple geographies in the country.
GoDaddy launched the campaign during the IPL to build a more personal and emotional connect with the target audience across India.
The first phase of Bijness Bhai was launched in 2018, when the brand worked towards encouraging people to turn their ideas into reality online and help people understand the ease and affordability of building a website to manage and grow their businesses.
Arora stated that due to the outbreak of the pandemic, marketing mix of various brands have been disrupted and the choice of medium has significantly shifted towards TV and OTT platform viewership, as well as social media conversations.
For the Indian market this year, the brand decided to use a range of media and marketing channels, including TV, social, and other digital properties to maximise reach with a variety of audiences. “Our distribution pattern while advertising for this year’s campaign included TV, Disney+Hotstar and all GoDaddy owned social platforms, from October until the end of this IPL season.”
He firmly believes that in today’s context customers have a number of tools at their fingertips to make purchase decisions. “This shift has given birth to omnichannel advertising to provide customers with a seamless experience across all communication channels. We are also working towards reaching out to our customers through various mediums of advertising.”
Brands
Zscaler, Airtel launch India AI Cyber Research Centre
New hub to boost cyber resilience and trusted AI use
NEW DELHI: As India’s digital engine roars ahead, so do the risks riding shotgun. In response, Zscaler, Inc. and Bharti Airtel have joined hands to launch the AI and Cyber Threat Research Center – India, a national initiative aimed at strengthening the country’s cyber defences and accelerating responsible AI adoption.
The centre is designed as a multi stakeholder platform that brings together industry, government and academia. Its mission is clear: protect critical sectors such as telecom, banking and energy, shield everyday digital users, and future proof India’s fast expanding online ecosystem.
India has long been a major innovation hub for Zscaler, with a substantial portion of its cyber research talent based here. With this new centre, that footprint evolves into a national collaboration engine. The idea is simple but ambitious, build in India, for India, and help power the country’s journey towards a secure and digitally self reliant future.
The timing is telling. India is building digital systems at population scale, not just enterprise scale. That scale has widened the attack surface dramatically. At the same time, cyber criminals and nation state actors are deploying AI to scan, probe and exploit vulnerabilities in minutes.
Zscaler’s research arm, ThreatLabz India, reports millions of infiltration attempts every month. These include espionage campaigns linked to regional geopolitical tensions, 1.2 million intrusion attempts from 20,000 sources targeting 58 Indian digital entities, and a rise in zero day exploit attempts across multiple industries.
In such an environment, perimeter based security models are struggling to keep pace. The new centre aims to push a shift towards secure by design systems and Zero Trust architecture.
Its strategy rests on four pillars: protect through real time intelligence, remediate by working directly with government agencies, facilitate adoption of AI driven security and Zero Trust frameworks, and build a stronger cybersecurity talent pipeline through specialised certifications.
As founding members, Zscaler and Airtel will combine global threat intelligence with local network visibility. Zscaler will deploy a dedicated India focused research team and draw insights from its Zero Trust Exchange platform, which processes over 500 billion daily transactions worldwide. Airtel, meanwhile, will contribute deep visibility into IoT and mobile traffic, helping detect suspicious activity faster and coordinate response across the ecosystem.
Bharti Airtel executive vice chairman Gopal Vittal, said the partnership extends Airtel’s commitment to safeguarding customers and the nation’s digital fabric. He added that the collaboration would address challenges unique to the Indian market and encourage secure and confident digital engagement.
Zscaler chief executive, chairman and founder Jay Chaudhry, said India’s digital ambition cannot be secured with legacy firewalls and VPNs. He noted that a modern Zero Trust architecture is essential for a hyper connected world and that the new centre would harness the scale of Zscaler’s global security cloud while empowering a new generation of Indian cyber defenders.
Additional members from critical public and private sectors are expected to join the initiative in the coming months, expanding its scope and deepening collaboration.
In a world where threats travel at machine speed, India’s answer is to think faster, collaborate wider and build smarter.
