Road To Safety
In conversation with Murtaza Bhatia, National Business Manager, Cybersecurity, Dimension Data
Cybersecurty has become a major issue with the fast advancing IT innovation. The hackers and online threats are keeping pace with the ever- going new technology. Murtaza Bhatia, National Business Manager, Cybersecurity, Dimension Data, has shared some insights with us. Excerpts follow
Briefly describe the preparedness of the vulnerable sectors
The preparedness of the vulnerable sectors lies in its underlying cybersecurity architecture, risk management, technology and operations deployment and its maturity. Currently the maturity that we see across APAC is slight less (1.75 out of 5) in terms of future state being planned from the global average (1.85 out of 5). This indicates more aggressive plans and investments are required to strengthen the to-be state. According to the findings from the Executive Guide to NTT Security’s 2019 Global Threat Intelligence Report, the average cybersecurity maturity rating globally stands at a worrying 1.45 out of 5 – a score determined by an organisation’s holistic approach to cybersecurity from a process, metrics and strategic perspective. However, the two of the most targeted sectors in 2018, finance (1.71) and technology (1.66) are ahead of the average global cyber maturity rating and ramping up their security posture and cybersecurity defences.
What is the status of R&D and innovation in combating cybersecurity especially in context of India?
As cybersecurity becomes a topic of boardroom discussion and gains a place of strategic importance, it is encouraging to witness an emerging security product ecosystem in India. The R&D and innovation in terms of integrating the cybersecurity ecosystem onto a single information exchange bus exchanging contextual information among various security controls is a key. Vendors are coming up with such integrations through open APIs and system integrators like us play a major role in implementing this complex integration to make security decisions more contextual thereby making the Zero Trust deployments more real. Threat intelligence plays a major contributor to this innovation as it provides predictive visibility and requirements of control and innovation within those controls.
How far have the cybersecurity innovations and information accepted in India?
According to a joint report by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and McKinsey, India is poised to be a $1 trillion economy by 2025
While developed nations have entered the sphere of cybersecurity decades ago, India is accelerating to develop critical infrastructure, work improved threat detection with predictive threat intelligence technology and build scalable and flexible security technologies
driven by digitisation. It is important to note the crucial role of security and privacy in driving and realising this digital economy. With weak regulation, low compliance and modest business relevance on security, India is lagging behind its developed counterparts in cybersecurity adoption. While finance and IT/ITes sectors have been early adopters of cybersecurity, security is yet to be seen as a business driver across other sectors. Instead, organisations in India are opting for cyber insurance to offset the financial liabilities in case of a security breach and as per a DSCI report there has been a 40 per cent year- on-year growth in the cyber insurance category. Hence, it is clear to say India is in a nascent stage of cyber security management and has a promising path ahead backed by concerted efforts of the public-private partnerships
How can the information, innovation and research about cybersecurity be transmitted to the maximum potential commercial clients?
Information exchange is key aspect in making cybersecurity decisions and predictive threat mitigation. An integration bus exchanging information among controls to share the contextual information is the best automated way to start. However, cybersecurity information exchange has to happen on both the channels through technology controls and through offline communication channels like social, print and video medium to make everyone aware of what’s happening, its impact on individual, companies and society and also the means to prevent or mitigate the same. Automation in this integrations and policy based secure exchange is also critical to upkeep the security posture, meet governance and reduce impact.