NASSCOM-DSCI 'Securing Our Cyber Frontiers' Report Released

The Report highlights cyber security issues at the national and global level; need for cooperation, and for information age response to the cyber challenge. It identifies priority areas for action, including 10 key recommendations in which the roles of government and the industry have been outlined. These recommendations take into consideration the ongoing global cyber security efforts and developments while keeping the Indian environment in context.

Hon’ble Union Home Minister, P Chidambaram said, “From a national security point of view, this is an important report and law enforcement agencies should quickly scale up their capacity to deal with these new crimes. We look forward to working with NASSCOM-DSCI in implementing the recommendations of NASSCOM-DSCI Report- Securing Our Cyber Frontiers.”

India’s current infrastructure development process is making greater use of IT applications, which makes it vulnerable to cyber attacks that can have serious implications for the nation and economy at large. Cyber security has direct bearing on national security since cyberspace merges seamlessly with the physical world and cyber attacks can disrupt critical infrastructure of the country producing effects similar to those of physical attacks on the infrastructure.

Recognising the fact that more and more critical infrastructure is being owned and operated by the private enterprises, NASSCOM-DSCI constituted the Cyber Security Advisory Group (CSAG), under the chairmanship of Rajendra Pawar, Ex-Chairman-NASSCOM Executive Council & Chairman- NIIT Group, with Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI as Member Secretary and experts from public and private sector and law enforcement. The Group was mandated to come up with recommendations for consideration by the government on public-private partnership in capacity building and policy making.

DSCI consolidated the preliminary recommendations provided by the CSAG members and also did an extensive study on polices and initiatives of developed countries and India’s initiatives to develop its own recommendations. Finally, it emerged that the Committee should prioritise the existing recommendations to provide the government key priority areas for action, detailing the role of the industry in each such area. As a result, the ‘Securing Our Cyber Frontiers’ has come out with ten key pragmatic and actionable recommendations which also detail the role of the government and industry. The report is available here: http://www.dsci.in/node/1092