Indian Firms Still Lack Sense Of Urgency On Cybersecurity, Says IBM

Indian companies spend lesser than global peers on cybersecurity even as the costs of data breach are rising, Marc van Zadelhoff, the global security chief at IBM, said.

The average cost of a data breach in India rose 12.3 percent to Rs 11 crore this year over 2016, a recent study by IBM and Ponemon Institute revealed. While the global average is $3.62 million (over Rs 23 crore), it fell 10 percent over the previous year.

“I think the percentage of spending on IT security is a little lower here (in India). The sense of urgency is not yet there,” van Zadelhoff told BloombergQuint. “If you go to Europe or the U.S., you see it's really a board topic, something the CIO has started to spend 5-6 percent of IT budget on. Here, it's probably 2 or 3 percent...”

That may be worrisome as India was the third worst hit nation by ransomware WannaCry in May. The country wasn't spared by the Petya virus when its largest container port, Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, along with local units of multinational companies like WPP and Mondelez International, were brought to a halt by the ransomware attack. A few weeks later, data breaches were reported at Zomato and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd.

Zadelhoff said while there is a need for India to catch up on rolling out some of the newer cybersecurity technologies, he also points out that the solution isn't all that fancy or advanced. Instead, it's important to get the basics right first, he said.

Companies like IBM Security offer the tools to get the basics right, besides the state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence and cognitive solutions. Zadelhoff said by applying its cognitive system Watson to the security space, IBM has managed to do something unique.

His team taught Watson how to read everything in the security space for several months. They then fed Watson thousands of documents a day and in the process, the system read every blog, textbook, certification programme available, ingested it and parsed out relevant information that was then injected into IBM's analytics platform.

“As people are diagnosing their security leveraging our software, Watson is looking over their shoulder and saying ‘hey, yesterday if that's what you're seeing in your company, that's a new attacker that we saw from Eastern Europe and these two are linked',” Zadelhoff said.