The Hindu Business Line : `Indian IT cos must focus on integrated data security'

INDIAN companies have been forced to adopt integrated data and security solutions driven by negative reporting on business process outsourcing (BPO), strict European Union data protection rules and other regulatory compliances.

As a result, the Union Government and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) are working towards bringing in legislative changes and companies are making the shift proactively to win outsourcing contracts, according to the Global Security Head of Deloitte, Mr Adel Melek.

Mr Melek said that a recent survey had pointed out that about 25 per cent of the enterprises were ignorant of security related issues, 50 per cent were in the awareness phase while 20 per cent had embarked on corrective steps and just 5 per cent were operationally excellent, being pro-active in their security infrastructure.

Speaking at an event on security and safety hosted by Nasscom here on Tuesday, Mr Melek said that lack of security infrastructure and policies in India would provide further ammunition to critics of outsourcing and offshoring in the West.

Referring to spam, Mr Melek said it was estimated that about 83 per cent of the global traffic on the Net is considered spam. Confronted with such a scenario, financial services providers are faced with the challenge of managing large flow of mails. On the one side, they are faced with regulatory and compliance issues that bar them from contacting customers; on the other, being integrated players, their customers expect better services. One way out is share data and work in `coopetition'.

On corporate scandals, Mr Melek said a study of the corporate world reflected a situation of non-stop action right from Enron.

This had brought to the fore more legislation making it mandatory for companies to bring in new approaches to both managing large data and providing necessary retrieval and security system.Identity theft and KYC (know your customer) are forcing large financial service providers to come up with a holistic approach to enterprises. Though it is yet to pick up, it will not be long before these bring about changes, he said.

Deloittee security practice

Mr Melek said that Deloitte has been chosen as the leading security consulting firm having about 4,500 people. Of these, the Asia-Pacific region has 400, India 300, Europe 1,100, Latin America 1,100 and North America 2,300."Of them over 1,000 are dedicated to security and privacy consulting services," he said.

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