Govts look beyond Android, IOS to secure devices

Governments across the world are deliberating over securing their digital footprint and sensitive data from new-age hackers and an end-to-end, reliable and trustworthy operation system (OS) beyond Android or IOS is top of their minds. Russian government via its national operator Rose Telecom recently acquired 75 per cent of the “Aurora OS” platform built on Finnish firm Jolla’s “Sailfish OS”. Russia with “Aurora OS” wants to build a safe digital society with the Aurora OS for devices used across corporates and stateowned companies. Jolla is also looking to license its platform for domestic OS for some of the countries. Similarly, a Brazilian company “Sikur” has built a highly secure OS and software platform to be scaled across different devices from smartphones, trading stations, industrial IOT, POS machines, wearables and so forth.

The time is ripe for the Indian government to join the bandwagon and look for a secure OS for its operations. “In the world of geo-political tensions, tech cold war and protectionism, countries such as China, Russia and Brazil are trying to push for

an OS which is more controlled and is privacy led to the actors outside of their home countries. The Indian government should also strive to own such secure OS for devices part of its key operations,” Neil Shah, Research Director, Counterpoint Research said. Brazil government is already using “Sikur Phones” to make the devices and communication highly secure and private. “We believe Harmonyos is also a step in that direction to create a ‘national OS’ for China first and then scale it outside the country,” Shah added. Sikur has created a way to provide total security on any application, be it banking, stocks, news, cryptocurrency, wallets or email.n