These days, we keep hearing or reading
about some or the other cyber-attack – hackers keep using ransomware on the
data of various government agencies and big corporates all over the world. Even
our firm website has been hacked many a times.

As a consequence, no individual,
government or company is feeling safe about its data in the cyber world – data
belonging to one and all is increasingly becoming vulnerable to cyber-attack of
hackers.

In the light of upsurge in
cyber-attack incidents by cyber hackers, the Central Government has recognised
the imminent need to intensify its efforts to fortify cyber security practices to
safeguard the data from cyber threats.

Accordingly, the Central Government in
association with leading IT companies (Microsoft, Intel, Redhat and Dimension
Data as founding partners) has taken the first public – private partnership of
its kind, an initiative titled Cyber Surakshit Bharat Initiative (“Initiative”).

Knowledge partners of the Cyber
Surakshit Bharat initiative are Cert-In, NIC, NASSCOM and the FIDO Alliance,
CISCO and consultancy firms (Deloitte and EY).  

The underlying intent of this Initiative is to educate
government staff about importance of cyber security and provide adequate training
to ensure that they possess ample knowledge of cyber technology to safeguard
government confidential information and data from cyber threats and attacks.

Another dimension of the Initiative is to build capacity for
safety measures for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and frontline
IT staff across all government departments. 

The initiative is likely to create a collegium of IT people
with best brains in the business from public and private sectors with the
object to construct a robust cyber security system in place to ensure all
confidential data and information is protected from cyber threats or attacks.

The Initiative will include an awareness programme on the
importance of cyber-security; a series of workshops on best cyber practices and
enablement of the officials with cyber-security health tool kits to manage and
mitigate cyber threats.

One can hope that the serious implementation of the
Initiative will certainly ensure that all government staff is well armored with
adequate cyber-security health tool kits to safeguard the confidential data of
the government by mitigating the cyber threats posed.

Success of the Initiative will certainly encourage more people
and entities to adopt modules employed under the Initiative to safeguard their
data from cyber threats.

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This is a sample chapter from my next book.

About the author :

Bhumesh Verma is a lawyer with over 2 decades of experience in advising domestic and international clients on corporate transactions (M&A, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Startups, corporate advisory, etc.) and features in “The A-List – India’s Top 100 Lawyers” by India Business Law Journal. He keeps writing frequently on FDI, M&A and other corporate matters and is a guest faculty as well. He can be reached at [email protected].

Research and Inputs by Paruchuri Baswanth Mohan