At a time when increasing instances of motivated co-ordinated cyber attacks have become a big headache for governments all over the world, software giant Microsoft’s India division inaugurated a full-scale Cyber Security Engagement Center (CSEC) in India late last week.
The official launch of CSEC follows a successful year-long pilot that Microsoft launched in Oct 2015. This happens to be the company’s first CSEC in India and the seventh in the world. The launch has coincided a major security breach in India’s banking system that saw over three million debit cards of various banks being compromised.
“We believe security of critical information is imperative for our corporate customers, just as it is vital to ensure security and privacy of citizen data and transactions. Our first investment towards this was setting up our local data centres in India and the Cybersecurity Engagement Centre is the second,” said Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India, while addressing the media in New Delhi.
With CSEC, Microsoft aims to provide digital protection across all endpoints ranging from data centers to sensors. It will also focus on detection of newly launched and ongoing cyber attacks using targeted signals, machine learning, and behavioral monitoring. The ultimate goal is to close the usually significant time gap between the discovery of an attack and countermeasures on case by case basis.
Worth noting, security software maker Kaspersky Lab recently named India among the top five country worst affected by ransomware – a type of malware that can encrypt or lock data on computers or mobile devices and then forces victims to ransom their way out of the trouble.
In an effort to learn more about the security challenges faced by India’s various institutions, Microsoft recently consulted more than 100 organizations across the country.
“The team observed three common IT issues plaguing them that include unmanaged and unregulated IT assets usage, procurement and maintenance, poor knowledge of cyber hygiene among users within organizations and inability of companies to timely monitor, detect and remove cyber threats,” the company said.
Apart from helping enterprises boosting their cyber security infrastructure, the CSEC will also be expanding Microsoft’s public-private partnerships in the rising South Asian economy.