Lack of homegrown IT security products, big risk for India: CISO report

Competency level of Indian firms in using response and predictive security technologies is found to be very low

Most Indian firms do not consider IT security as a top priority and are at least 10 times behind United States in terms of adopting emerging IT security technologies such as cloud access security brokers, threat intelligence and containerization to protect sensitive information when firms allow employees to bring their own device, a report from a IT security body said on Wednesday.

CISO, an online community of chief information security officers in a report on Wednesday said this is compounded by the lack of growth in homegrown IT security technology firms.

"There is a lack of indigenous IT Security technology companies from India. India has produced less than 25 indigenous IT security product companies compared to more than 500 in USA. As a nation, we need to allocate more resources towards building security technologies," said CISO, which conducted this study among IT security professionals of 400 large companies in the country.

Lack of priority for security at the board level or at the chief executive level and lower investments in IT security teams, who are not trained in emerging areas of security is also a big risk for the Indian industry.

The report warned the competency level of Indian firms in using response and predictive security technologies is very low, even as it compared itself in adoption of prevention and detection technologies to the United States.

"In the field of IT security, it is impossible to secure everything, every time. So it is extremely critical to have effective measures to respond to a breach or predict a breach before it happens. India is far behind USA in terms of such readiness and capabilities like incident response, threat intelligence, etc," the report said.