“Securing” The “Digital Transformation” of India

Authored by Ravinder Pal Singh, Director - Cybersecurity, Digital Healthcare & Digital Cities, India, Dell EMC  

Over the past three decades, India’s economic and social growth has made us the second fastest growing country as well as a services powerhouse in the knowledge industry. Especially in the past couple of years, digital transformation of every aspect of our life has played a key role in solidifying our global position. Be it the Mission 100 Smart Cities or the biggest Citizen Identification drive, Aadhaar, we are known to deliver large and complex digital initiatives, which have eased a major part of our social and public transactions. 

From being a mere buzzword to ground reality—the Smart Cities Mission has moved to its next stage. This mission provides a big market opportunity pegging at $1.56 trillion and as many as 26 smart cities are projected to be set up by 2025. With smart cities, a gamut of benefits, including better transportation, energy management, and waste management, will be available to common people. Nevertheless, the development of these cities also signifies the growing vulnerability both in terms of unintentional incidents and cyberattacks. And this is where comes the rising importance of cybersecurity. Especially, of late, concerns like Ransomware attacks and Aadhar data security breach have raised a big question around the cybersecurity issue. With every new benefit there is always a darker side of misuse of such parameters, nevertheless, we must realize that addressing this issue is the need of the hour, no more an afterthought. 

In 2017, Dell Technologies in partnership with an independent futures research group, Institute for the Future (IFTF), delved into exploring the emerging technologies shaping the future of the human experience in the next decade. According to the report titled ‘The Next Era of Human Machine Partnerships’ conducted by Dell and IFTF, “The threat of falling victim to security breaches is no longer a technology problem, but a business problem. This will elevate the role of building and maintaining secure systems, as well as designing effective response strategies. Over the next decade, people will digitally transmit more and more traceable data, blending in many cases, their physical and digital identities.” As a result, maintaining consumer trust will be vital. Organizations should show that they’ve gone to the nth degree to protect their customers’ data. 

We can group the entire Security landscape into a three-segmented approach: 

 1. Securing the EDGE: This pertains to all the endpoints and edge devices, which are there in the open/field and susceptible to multiple risks. A good example will be the IoT devices and system being implemented in Smart Cities. 

 2. Securing the CORE: A major part of threat comes from the very core of Compute and Data location – the Data Center. It is where we have all key applications are hosted, computed and analyzed. Smart Cities, Healthcare, Financial platforms like GSTN are some god examples of the CORE segment. 

 3. Securing the CLOUD: With cloud becoming a more preferred way of delivering services even in key Govt projects, it is imperative that securing Cloud access and content is of utmost importance. Using the aforesaid approach with respect to Smart Cities, we can look at the various aspects of securing it: 

EDGE- Field and End User	CORE   Data Center/Command Center Hosted	CLOUD   Cloud Hosted (Private/Hybrid/Public)
Sensors	Core Network Switches and Routers	City Wide applications (Solid Waste/Video Analytics/ITMS/etc)
Data Aggregators and IOT Gateway	Compute	Apps for Citizens and Smart City Operators
Active devices and systems in the field	Storage	Data in cloud
Smartphones and Tablets used by Smart City maintenance team	Application platforms
Surveillance cameras and devices	Command and Control Systems
PC and Laptops	Emergency Systems and Responders

Apart from the system tools and applications, there is a critical importance of Processes and Procedures to be adopted to ensure Security at every step. This includes using SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) and Response processes for any Security breach and event. 

The mounting force of digital disruption is reshaping the entire industry and our lives as well. The stakes to transform are now higher. The time is ripe to tap into these emerging technologies to thrive today as well as tomorrow and pave the way for 2030!