Shachar to ensure customers have infrastructure and partner ecosystem
Upwind, the runtime-first cloud security leader from San Francisco, is expanding in India as part of a broader scale-up across Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), responding to challenges faced by enterprises in a new era of real-time cloud and AI risk.
Building on its established offices in Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney, Upwind has grown its global customer base by 200% year over year and more than tripled its APJ workforce in the past three months alone, reflecting accelerating demand across the region.
To support this momentum, Upwind has invested in local infrastructure, expanded its engineering and go-to-market teams, and deployed in-region SaaS instances across India, Australia, Singapore, and Japan to support data residency, performance, and regulatory requirements, alongside a partner-first strategy.
“Upwind is expanding across APJ to ensure customers have the local infrastructure, expertise, and partner ecosystem they need to operationalize runtime security and innovate securely at scale,” Amiram Shachar, Co-founder and CEO of Upwind, said on 2 Mar.
Across APJ, rapid cloud adoption is fueling digital transformation, but it’s also exposing live cloud environments to escalating risk.
In India, 85% of organizations reported a cloud security incident in the past year, with average breach costs exceeding Rs.220 million.
In Australia, more than 75% of organizations have faced malicious cloud activity, contributing to an estimated A$86 billion in economic impact from outages and cyber incidents.
Singapore is seeing similar pressure, with 70% of organizations reporting at least one breach and average costs reaching S$16 million, while Japan faces rising incidents amid low cybersecurity maturity across enterprises.
As hybrid and multi-cloud environments grow more complex, and regulatory expectations tighten under frameworks such as DPDA, PDPA, MAS guidelines, and evolving national cyber standards, cloud risk has shifted from theoretical exposure to real-time business impact. Runtime cloud security is becoming essential across the region, enabling organizations to protect what is actively running, reachable, and exploitable in dynamic cloud environments.
“Across APJ, cloud and AI are accelerating faster than most security models were built for,” said Shachar, continuing, “Environments are dynamic and distributed by default, attackers operate in real time, and teams are overwhelmed by alerts without clear context on what actually matters.
“We built Upwind around an inside-out view of cloud risk grounded in runtime, so enterprises can prioritize active risk, reduce noise, and make faster, more confident decisions. We’re expanding across APJ to ensure customers have the local infrastructure, expertise, and partner ecosystem they need to operationalize runtime security and innovate securely at scale.”
“As someone who has seen APJ’s cloud evolution from both the boardroom and the front lines of security leadership, the shift is undeniable: cloud risk is no longer theoretical. It is operational, immediate, and directly tied to business resilience,” said Rinki Sethi, Chief Security & Strategy Officer at Upwind.
“Across APJ, cloud and AI are becoming foundational to economic growth and digital transformation. Security leaders are accountable not only for protection, but for regulatory confidence, operational continuity, and preserving customer trust. That requires decisions grounded in what is actually happening in production environments. Upwind’s inside-out, runtime-first approach gives organizations the visibility and confidence they need to manage cloud risk responsibly while supporting sustained innovation.”
By establishing local SaaS instances across APJ, Upwind aligns with regional data residency, performance and operational requirements, reinforcing long-term commitment to customers operating complex, distributed cloud environments.
This expansion is matched by investment in on-the-ground teams across Sydney, Singapore, India and Japan. Upwind is building local capabilities across field sales, marketing, solutions architecture and customer support, ensuring customers and partners have access to regional expertise and support aligned with local market realities.
Upwind’s APJ expansion is built on a partner-first approach. Over the past year, Upwind has added 100+ new partners across ISVs, MSPs and resellers, strengthened its strategic partnership with NVIDIA and hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure, and recently announced a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), further strengthening its expansion. As a select CNAPP partner integrated into the Extended Plan for AWS Security Hub, Upwind is embedded within AWS’s consolidated security operating model, enabling customers to procure, deploy, and operate runtime-first cloud security through a simplified single-vendor AWS experience.
Together, this ecosystem approach enables enterprises across APJ to integrate runtime intelligence seamlessly into their existing cloud environments, reduce operational friction across security and engineering teams, and prioritize active, real-time risk that matters most to their business, strengthening security outcomes while supporting sustainable growth across the region.
“As our cloud and Kubernetes footprint expanded, we needed a single, real-time console to manage our overall security posture,” said Vishal Arora, Head of DevOps, Cloud & Platform Engineering at Times Internet.
“Upwind provided unified visibility, deep workload intelligence, and actionable risk prioritization across environments. This significantly reduced alert fatigue, improved response times, and enabled us to innovate securely at scale while staying aligned with evolving compliance and resilience needs,” he said.
“For a digital platform like CRED, where millions of members rely on us to protect sensitive financial data, cloud security has to be precise, responsive, and embedded into how we build,” said Himanshu Kumar Das, CISO at CRED.
“As our infrastructure scaled, we needed stronger alignment between security and engineering around what truly poses risk to the business. Upwind helped us filter out noise and focus on the issues that could directly impact security, service integrity, availability, customer trust, or regulatory posture. That clarity has enabled faster decision-making, tighter execution across teams, and a more resilient foundation as we continue to scale,” said Das.
Upwind’s expansion across APJ supports its broader global growth strategy while addressing the needs of enterprise and regulated customers that require regional data residency, performance guarantees and local expertise. As cloud and AI risk increasingly becomes a board-level business concern tied to availability, revenue and customer trust, Upwind’s runtime-first approach is designed to help organizations protect modern cloud environments as they operate in real time. Fiinews.com
