As India moves ahead with the Digital India dream of PM Narendra Modi, one of the major challenge faced is related to data. Data is considered as the new oil today. While many organisations are looking at how they can make most of the data that they have, there are also concerns on how to protect their business data. Considering, data breaches multiplying in frequency and scale, the fifth edition of ‘Cyber Security & Data Protection India Summit 2018’ was successfully organised.
Organised by Bharat Exhibitions, the event acknowledged the importance of data in the digital revolution. It was emphasised that the need of the hour is data security and privacy.
There should be a public awareness campaign to address the menace of phishing.
It brought around the best minds in Cyber security under one roof to create an interactive milieu for exchange of knowledge and ideas and addressed the emerging and continuing threats to Cyber security and its changing landscape, as well as respond to increasing risk of security breaches and security governance, application security, cloud based security, Network, Mobile and endpoint security and other cyber risks in the India and abroad.
In the special address by Maj. Gen. Sandeep Sharma, VSM, NTRO agreed that the cyber attacks were seeing an upward trend and almost every sector is affected by the same.
Moving with Digital India, Shri Vinit Goenka, Member Governing Council of CRIS, Ministry of Railways & Member Taskforce IT, Ministry of Road, Transport & Highways and Shipping, Govt. of India shared how Railways had started harnessing the data. He suggested, “Why not convert this data into an opportunity for the country. We could have created data sovereignty patterns. The data that we have capitalised, monetised and we should not be restricting our conversation only around protecting the data.”
Sharing his perspective on whether the end users today understand about data security and privacy, Shri Anand Pande, Senior Vice President & CISO, Goods And Services Tax Network, “People do understand the importance of security, privacy I think we are still catching up with the overall concepts and its importance as a nation.”
Sharing a different perspective on the cyber security issue, Dr. Prashun Gupta, Deputy Director, CCTNS & CISO, National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt. of India said, “There is a need to re-look into the cyber security strategy.” Taking example of ATM frauds he suggested that before dispensing any money, the ATM machine can be programmed to ask for an OTP and that can help eliminating this fraud.
Talking about Internet of Things (IoT), Mr. Saurabh Jain, Vice President, Paytm, said, “Organisation engaged in IoT are talking about solutions and not really thinking about the security aspects.” He even broached on the challenge about storing data and in his point of view that the data of the country should remain within the country. If there is some cyber crime using that data and it is stored within India then there is some probability of that crime being solved.
India’s cyber security market size is about $4 billion, which is expected to grow to $35 billion by 2025. All the panellist agreed that though we are moving towards Digital India, the increase in data privacy issues is posing a challenge and there is a need for greater security measures.
The event was supported by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Govt of India, Broadband India Forum, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Cyber Watch and Surveillance Forum.