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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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].