Keeping safe our digital India plans
By Prempal Singh
This kind of year’s budget is a watershed budget for cyber security and digital economy in many ways. Although it is motivating to see initiatives being taken to promote cyber security, India still lacks a national level program for cyber security along with an enough budget to apply it. It is necessary to highlight that a cyber security program is not about technology -it is also about developing specifications and guidelines to advertise security, developing a capacity in conditions of both law enforcement officials, and niche technical skills, and creating a governance structure to ensure general public and sector entities conform to the national suggestions.
Countries such as UK, Germany, and US have developed a series of 3-5 cyber security strategies, along with plainly defined funds.
Have a look at UK’s most recent National Cyber Security approach 2016-21, which has been released in November 2016 -the strategy commits to invest GBP 1.9 billion Rs 16,000 crore) above the five-years (. period. The strategy focuses on three critical levers: Protecting national IT infrastructure (Government and citizens), deter band and counter-acting cyber-crime and cyber-terrorism and finally, producing capacities (both people and new technology) to protect British cyberspace. Further, the strategy also mentions the establishment of a Countrywide Cyber Security Center (NCSC), which will serve as the central authority in charge of implementing the strategy and managing this.
Cyber security is a field that changes continually and hence, government authorities alone cannot be in charge of all elements of the cyber security strategy. Involving the private sector and institutions is essential – Australia, for example, released it is 4 year (2016-2020) Internet Security Strategy after asking over 190 organizations, over a period of period of 18 months. Further, the Prime Minister’s Cabinet is in charge of implementing the strategy and has the price range of AUD 230 million 1, 200 crores) above the next 4 (. years to do so. India’s cyber security budget seems inadequate when compared to global pow. 85 ers in 2015-16, India allocated ` crore to cyber security (. 775 over 5 years 2015-20), which translates to 1400 of UK’s per household expenditure (over 5 years), or 1700 of USA’s gross annual cyber security budget! The first step toward creating a ‘Cyber Secure’ India is to build up an overall strategy encompassing federal government, academia, the private sector and civil societies. Once the strategy is in place, the responsibility of cyber security should be assigned to a single agency with enough funding.