Cybersecurity In The New Decade: India And Enterprise Security In The 2020s

As the nation is on a rapid digitisation trajectory, India is reaping the rewards that technology delivers. Growing convergence between new-age digital tools and business processes is unlocking unparalleled opportunities to streamline operations, enhance service delivery, tap into new business opportunities, and improve profitability. Little wonder, then, that a 2019 McKinsey report estimates the country’s digital economy to create business value to the tune of $1 trillion by 2025.

But while growing digitisation in the enterprise ecosystem is undoubtedly driving business growth, it is also leaving the door open for a major business challenge: cybersecurity.

Security Visibility And Proactive Remediation: Keys To A Secure Digital Future

The Indian enterprise ecosystem’s poor security readiness is no secret. A recent Frost & Sullivan report estimated that more than two-thirds (69%) of Indian organisations were at the heightened risk of a security breach, while around 44% had suffered a data breach in the past 12 months. More importantly, the report highlighted how 25% of the organisations surveyed had not conducted any breach assessment in over a year.

This is alarming, particularly in light of growing interconnectivity and the proliferation of digital devices within the business ecosystem. The BYOD work culture is now prevalent across many offices and workplaces; more and more personal devices are now being used to complete professional tasks, access critical work emails, and store enterprise data. IoT adoption is also increasing at a rapid pace within the enterprise ecosystem. With the pace of this digital penetration expected to increase exponentially in the near future, enterprise IT architectures will become more complex.

Cybercriminals are viewing this as a unique opportunity, devising more evolved attack methodologies and campaigns that can turn each device, each endpoint into a potential point of entry into the larger enterprise network. Add to this the fact that an overwhelming percentage of Indian enterprises don’t have adequate visibility into their cybersecurity health, and it becomes apparent that CIOs/CISOs have a monumental challenge facing them. Countering the scale and sophistication of these new-age threats will require CIOs/CISOs to have seamless, real-time visibility of their enterprise architectures.

This is why, in 2020, there will be a large-scale shift towards AI-powered vulnerability management solutions that can map threats and vulnerabilities across the entire organisational IT stack and present in-depth actionable insights to address the same. Doing so will allow enterprises to initiative more proactive and robust enterprise defence against cyber-attacks, as well as to streamline security operations for better structure and reportability.

To say that cybersecurity, today, has become a critical business imperative would be making a massive understatement. The introduction of global data privacy policies and recent large-scale breaches caused by poor enterprise security frameworks have renewed the conversation around the need for more robust and effective cybersecurity solutions around the world. The Indian business ecosystem is already leading the way when it comes to digital adoption – it has an unparalleled opportunity to do the same for enterprise cybersecurity by adopting cutting-edge vulnerability management practices.