Cyber security: It's time to go from protection to prevention

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India’s digital economy is expected to hit $1 trillion by 2025. Advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Mobility and Robotics are creating innovations at a speed and scale unparalleled in human history. This has resulted in many debates about the effect these profound technological changes will have on the way we work, socialise and interact.

On one-hand, while this has opened doors to the transformation of business models, it has also presented nearer term pressure on security where the ability for organisations and individuals to manage and control data has become top of the board room agenda globally.

However, in India, cyber security is still largely a reactive component for businesses and not something that is proactively addressed as a strategy. It is something that needs to be addressed, especially as we face one of the highest number of cyber threats globally.

Cybersecurity threats looms over every organisation, big or small, startup or multi-national, even the Government of India. Here are four statistics/figures that will demonstrate the magnitude of the issue –

» 39 percent of 500,000 security alerts daily aren’t attended to

» The time taken to even identify a security breach has increased to 188 days from 170 days in 2016

» We face the highest repeat breaches i.e., 23 percent

» Average cost of a single data breach was Rs 11.9 crore ($1.7 million) in 2017

This is highly unsettling to businesses as fraud and data theft cause are not just a financial loss but also leads to reputation damage and consequently loss of business. This is detrimental to their very survival in a global digital economy. As businesses, small and large, struggle to combat the danger from cyber-attacks, the threats continue to evolve, and get more sophisticated posing an even greater threat. So, what should businesses do?

Secondly, we need to adopt next-gen cyber solutions to support humans. Next-gen technologies such as AI has the potential to identify and analyse patterns of attack and defeat them before they even become a security concern. This powerful tool can, without error or oversight, examine a vast set of events such as traffic logs which are largely overlooked by professionals, and highlight those that require immediate attention. While AI will not solve a threat, by injecting AI and similar technologies within the larger gamut of threat-monitoring controls, organisations will be empowered to efficiently and cost-effectively defend complex attacks.

Finally, as businesses realise and begin to shift their focus from protection to prevention, they need to put in place a comprehensive security services framework that takes into consideration every single element of a threat; including risk and compliance, identity and access management, data security and privacy and threat management supported by analytics that will allow companies to pivot from a reactive to a predictive model.

Disruptive technologies and the accompanying innovations have changed our realities. We need to accept that to thrive in this data-driven world, end-to-end security is a top priority and work towards this with immediacy.

It’s time we confront our cybersecurity flaws.

The author is Chief Digital Officer at Tata Communications.