Enterprises cannot afford to lose sensitive data as it can have lasting impact on business sustainability and reputation. Enterprise cybersecurity, especially, in a vast country like India, has become extremely crucial, says Aditya Kinra, Vice President, Tata Teleservices who in an interaction with CIO Axis, shares technologies and trends his organization is focussing on.
CIO AXIS: What is your outlook for acceleration of the digital transformation these days?
Aditya Kinra: COVID -19 has been a tipping point for digital transformation, the sudden witch to remote digital world has the potential to accelerate digitally enabled environments and workplace transformation. A few organsiations have handled this forced digital transformation smoothly and the others more fitfully. Digitally driven businesses that continue to modernize their operations stand a better chance for survival, growth and market leadership. For enterprises, technology is and will remain a key differentiator as they figure out new ways of operating their business, building resilience in their supply chains and making their distributed work force more secure and collaborate in more meaningful ways. Also, there is a strong sense of push for digitalization from customers who have now become comfortable with all things digital, and they prefer working with companies that offer superior digital experience and frictionless business transactions.
As businesses progress on digital transformation journey, cloud is becoming a vital part of their modernization strategy. Cloud is acting as a backbone for all their transformative technologies as it enables them to strengthen their engagement with customers through seamless communication -anytime and anywhere.; with no capex investments and also offers huge improvements in their RoI.The Covid-19 pandemic has infact, preponedCloud adoption by several years; majority of enterprises have positively responded towards it and managed to maintain business continuity. According to an industry estimate, more than 60 per cent of the Indian organisations have leveraged or planning to leverage Cloud platforms for digital innovation with revised spending on the IT infrastructure.
There has been remarkable growth in adoption of Cloud based solutions, Collaboration solutions, AI and IoT, Data Management solutions that allow enterprises to integrate, secure and manage data efficiently. Businesses have also executed optimum risk-mitigation strategies to face the pandemic and acclimatize for any future crises. The emerging future of work, as we can clearly see is being driven by a network economy that is defined by cost efficiency and digital agility.
CIO AXIS: What do you expect to be different when it comes to cybersecurity in a post-COVID-19 world?
Aditya Kinra: Enterprise cybersecurity, especially, in a vast country like India, has become extremely crucial. The firms that are dealing with huge pile of consumer personal data, financial details, and demographic data in the form of digital footprints have to be highly cautious. Cyber criminals are using social engineering, phishing, identity theft, spam emails, malware, ransomware and whaling to compromise their targets. According to an industry estimate, cyberattacks like phishing and ransomware saw an upswing during the pandemic; India is in fact now second in global ransom payouts in cyberattacks. Enterprises cannot afford to lose sensitive data as it can have lasting impact on business sustainability and reputation.
As the vital infrastructure of businesses go digital, enterprises need to reassess their digital preparedness and improve the security of their remote users and devices along with the critical data associated with them. This implies investment in a more effective endpoint, email and web security infrastructure,
Besides undertaking effective security measures, the enterprises need to adopt following strategies to ensure robust cybersecurity while remote working :
• The enterprises need to impart basic level Security audit, cybersecurity knowledge and develop training programs for the employees on data security and privacy issues. It will help the employees identify various attack vectors and report the same to their IT team or security managers.
• Having a unified threat management system with integration of firewall, IPS/IDS, anti-spam, content and web filtering can help the enterprises securely adopt the cloud and web-based services in today’s digital economy.
• To strengthen the security of the enterprises, it is important to implement multi-factor authentication as it helps to enable all systems, endpoints and internal applications. It also provides an additional layer of protection that prevents the attackers from entering the enterprise infrastructure on the cloud or on-premises.
CIO AXIS: What are your proposals to build an effective cybersecurity strategy in these times?
Aditya Kinra: Our partnership with FirstWave brings a comprehensive portfolio of next-gen Platform based security solutions to our enterprise customers in India.FirstWave has demonstrative global expertise and deep understanding in cybersecurity management. TTBS leverages their Cloud Content Security Platform (CCSP), to offer email security, web security, next generation firewall, endpoint security and multi-factor authentication (MFA) Security Services.
TTBS’s Security proposition powered by FirstWave applies machine learning techniques and integrates with Security offerings from Security market leaders such as Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Trend Micro and Fortinet. This Security Platform enables our customers to easily access these comprehensive cybersecurity solutions that can be rapidly deployed at affordable subscription prices. These solutions secure our customers using public and private cloud applications while delivering operational efficiencies and reducing their overall security management costs due to multi-tenanted architecture.
Enterprises across BFSI, IT / ITes, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Fintech, EdTech etc. will now have access to one stop optimized market leading cybersecurity solutions backed by Tata Teleservices 24X7 managed service capabilities and trust.
CIO AXIS: According to you what are the positive conclusions from the last year of working from home?
Aditya Kinra: The ‘new normal’ created because of the pandemic, has become an inflection point for the digitally
enabled environments and workplace transformation. Earlier the employees would go to work
rather than work coming to them. Thus, it has given complete swing to Business Continuity Plan by
forcing all to set up access for employees at various points ie WFH / remote access.
India Enterprises were quick to respond to the challenges and the subsequent opportunities that
the pandemic has brought forth. The fundamental shift in the business ecosystem dominated by
remote working has pushed enterprises to change their business models, divert their operational
funds to scale-up their digital transformation. This has worked well for them to ensure their
survival, growth and market leadership. Enterprises are now relying on aggressive use of digital
tools to communicate with their employees and customers and providing access to reliable
applications and services that they need. Also, regulatory and security is crucial while we plan
Business Continuity Plans for new normal.
Enterprises that have invested in digital tools and ecosystem earlier have been able to adapt to
this contemporary disruptive business environment with ease. The next-gen technologies – AI, IoT
and Cloud are viewed as a key enabler that will drive digital transformation and help enterprise
unlock operational efficiencies.
CIO AXIS: What according to you should be way to drive innovation after COVID-19? What are Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) initiatives in this direction?
Aditya Kinra: Indian enterprises have realized the need of Industry 4.0 tools in order to compete in the global environment. Enterprises are now rapidly adopting next gen technologies to automate their business processes, adopt digital technology and become future-ready. These technologies give organizations the ability to develop new business models or undergo accelerated digital transformation which offers endless benefits such as optimize cost, improve productivity, become competitive, align business according to market demand, better financial planning & forecasting, Risk analysis and continuous improvement.
For the last two decades, our deep customer engagements have helped us to develop solutions that would enable Enterprises to compete and win in their respective business segments. This is reflected in our product innovations that have been widely recognized in the industry. Be it Ultra Lola for the broking segment or SIP Channel on Demand for marketing & service use cases or SmartOfficeTM, which is literally an office in a box; we always believed in garnering our customer’s trust based on executing customer first initiatives.
Our business growth trajectory has been ahead of the industry. This has been achieved largely by a strong focus on product innovation, customer centricity and largest channel network present in 60 cities. At TTBS, we strongly believe that customization leads to the innovation at a deeper level and provides higher value. We have strengthened our suite of remote working solutions, which includes hosted voice solutions to allow enterprises to quickly set up distributed call centers and enable agents to work from home/anywhere. Others like hosted audio and web conferencing solutions and international bridging services ensure connectivity and collaboration amongst teams spread across the globe.
We have recently partnered with Zoom to drive the unified communication space and offer Enterprises a highly secured and superior video-first communication platform on our state of the art, high-capacity network. With these solutions, businesses can now benefit immensely by gaining access to best of both worlds, including trusted service and a world class user -friendly interface with robust security layer. We have also collaborated with Fortinet to launch SD-WAN iFLX, an intelligently flexible networking solution designed to provide an enterprise with a highly flexible network to handle today’s complex digital and cloud applications, across all its locations.
Our highly flexible and scalable cloud communication suite – Smartflo, has been innovatively designed to boost business communication on cloud and support hybrid work force working from office and remote locations. It allows uninterrupted connectivity between all stakeholders, internally within employees and externally with customers and vendors across platforms and touchpoints.
At TTBS, we will continue to invest in rolling out a high capacity, high resilience fiber network and deploying the latest IT tools and bespoke business applications for our enterprise customers enabling them to grow and do big.