As cyber threats intensify and digital estates sprawl across clouds, endpoints and identities, cybersecurity brands face a new mandate: proving business value, not just technical strength. In India, incidents have more than doubled from 1.029 million in 2022 to 2.268 million in 2024, according to the Press Information Bureau. Indian companies also face attack volumes about 96% higher than the global average. Organisations experienced an average of 2,011 cyberattacks in 2025, significantly above global levels, as per ET Edge Insights.

Based on these numbers, Qualys, long known for vulnerability management, repositioned itself as a unified platform focused on resilience, continuity and confident decision-making, a shift central to Cody Hazen, digital marketing - director, Qualys’ mandate.

Hazen was in India last week, a market that anchors a significant share of Qualys’ global workforce and digital operations. During his visit, we caught up with him for a discussion around the enterprise's new pipeline while elevating the company’s broader platform story beyond legacy perceptions.

Edited excerpts:

What does your digital marketing playbook look like today? What’s delivering results, and what have you moved away from along the way?

We have long been recognised as a vulnerability management company, where we built our reputation. Today, we offer a comprehensive cybersecurity suite, a unified platform, and the concept of a ‘Risk Operations Centre’ that provides end-to-end visibility.

As a result, we’ve been working to elevate our platform story by shifting the audience we target, as well as the channels, mediums, and messaging we use. The cybersecurity industry moves incredibly fast, so a big part of this has simply been keeping pace. Interestingly, some classic tactics have come back into play in a meaningful way. Webinars, for instance, have been particularly effective. They fell out of favour for a while, but in a complex space like cybersecurity, not everything can be communicated through a search or display ad. Webinars create room for deeper engagement, bringing experts directly to the audience.

We’ve also seen strong results from in-person events. People are eager to meet face to face again, connect with peers, and have more substantive conversations. For us, that’s a powerful opportunity to tell the broader Qualys story beyond vulnerability management.

India is one of the world’s fastest-digitising economies with a uniquely large-scale digital infrastructure. What strategic importance does the market hold for Qualys right now, and what insights are you hoping to take back from your visit to India for your global digital marketing strategy?

The insights I’m looking to bring back to my leadership team from this visit aren’t specifically about India’s market dynamics, but about helping them better understand the NP Digital team. They’re a global workforce capable of managing all our digital needs regardless of location. They happen to be based in India, which is important for us, but ultimately, they’re our agency. This visit was about meeting face-to-face and building a deeper understanding of the business and its needs.

Cybersecurity marketing has long leaned on worst-case scenarios. What’s driving the shift toward positioning security as a driver of resilience, continuity and business confidence, and how is that reflected in your digital campaigns?

I don’t think it’s necessary to scare people into action. Our target audiences are already well aware of the cyber threats out there, so we focus instead on a narrative of business maturity and empowerment. Today, security leaders are expected to demonstrate resilience and tie their work to measurable business outcomes, so scare tactics don’t really resonate.

Companies face attacks constantly, and teams need clarity on which threats are most critical at any given moment. Our messaging is centred on helping them prioritise what matters most to the business. That’s where the concept of the Qualys Risk Operations Centre comes in. It’s about moving teams from treating everything as urgent to understanding what truly impacts the business, so they can act with confidence rather than simply reacting to the constant noise that comes with the job.

How do you balance a unified global brand narrative with region-specific messaging and channels, and what makes India a particularly distinctive communications environment?

Cybersecurity is a global challenge, so the core narrative has to remain consistent. The problems we are solving, and the business outcomes we’re driving, shouldn’t vary from region to region. Where we adapt is in how we tell the story, the examples we use and the channels we prioritise, based on how buyers in each market prefer to learn and engage.

Our approach is to anchor everything in a strong central story and shared assets, then empower regional marketing leads with the tools and flexibility to make that message resonate locally. With our partnership with NP Digital India, we now have on-the-ground insights that help us navigate India’s unique, community-driven professional landscape. Their role is to ensure the global vision translates effectively into the cultural nuances that define the market.

Enterprise buyers now research extensively before speaking to sales. How has this changed your digital channel mix, content strategy and approach to influencing decisions earlier in the funnel?

Our role in marketing is now less about pushing messages and more about showing up wherever people are forming their first impressions of the brand and the category. That shift has changed how we think about digital. It’s an evolution from SEO to AEO, ensuring our content is structured to appear in AI-generated responses, comparisons, technical evaluations, and research-led queries.

People are increasingly trusting LLM-driven answers, so we’re focused on addressing the specific questions buyers are actually asking: alternatives, implementation challenges, and measurable outcomes. The goal is to build trust early by offering clear, practical guidance that helps them navigate complex cybersecurity decisions. By the time they engage with our sales team, they already understand our perspective and see us as a credible partner.

This is probably where the NP Digital team has helped us evolve the most over the past six months. We’re not just showing up in these answer engines; we now have the analytics to demonstrate to leadership how we’re appearing against competitors and how every marketing function can act on those insights. Because this isn’t just about digital or SEO anymore, it requires coordinated effort across teams to ensure a strong, unified presence.

With first-party data becoming critical, cookies fading, and AI searches transforming marketing operations, how are these shifts changing your approach to targeting, personalisation and campaign optimisation?

This really comes back to AI and ensuring that Qualys is seen as the answer and the trusted source as prospects research the space, especially as we move away from cookie-based data signals. We’re closely aligned with our sales and product teams to define our high-value audiences, using intent signals and engagement data to guide targeting and deliver relevant, personalised experiences rather than simply chasing reach.

We are also seeing a renewed emphasis on contextual marketing strategies, alongside a shift in attribution toward measuring influence rather than just assigning credit. The NP Digital team in India has been instrumental in helping us shape this new view of marketing performance, giving us a clearer understanding of full-funnel impact and the value these programs deliver, which is essential when it comes to justifying marketing investments to leadership.

Security success is often invisible when nothing goes wrong. How do you make prevention tangible in digital storytelling while communicating the value of a unified platform over fragmented point solutions?

A good security solution often means nothing visible happens, which is why we don’t focus on worst-case scenarios. Instead, we show customers how they’re reducing exposure over time, prioritising the right actions, and improving operational efficiency, outcomes that security leaders can clearly see and report to their leadership teams.

This is where the ‘Qualys Risk Operations Centre’ is especially impactful. Rather than managing a collection of disconnected tools, we position security around a unified operating model that brings together visibility, prioritisation, and action in one place. Our digital storytelling shifts the narrative from individual features to demonstrating how a connected platform enables clearer decisions, cuts through the noise, and builds confidence in an organisation’s security posture.

Lastly, when deals can take months or years to close, where does digital marketing create the most measurable impact and which metrics truly matter internally?

Good marketing is critical at every stage, regardless of how long the sales cycle is. A single poor touchpoint can negatively shape how customers perceive the brand. What has changed are the metrics. Marketing was once seen purely as top of funnel and sales as bottom of funnel, but today our value comes from influencing the entire journey, with a strong focus on ABM engagement and pipeline velocity.

We work closely with sales to identify the accounts and segments that matter most, then concentrate our efforts on reaching those accounts while providing insights on when and how to engage them. The goal is to help sales close deals faster and at higher values, the business-critical KPIs that truly define success.