Cisco India boss' advice to start-ups: Security should be ingrained into the way you build your product

Cyber security challenges are for real. It's not just the large and medium enterprises and businesses who have been attacked but even the governments and individuals are struggling. The governments and enterprises have specially allocated funds and teams in place to fight cyber-attacks but most of the startups don't. And when start-ups are attacked, they often don't know how to remediate and where to start. Daisy Chittilapilly, President, Cisco India & SAARC, said, "Start-ups should not think of security after doing everything and laying it on the top. Security has to be ingrained into the way you build your product."

Implementing security solutions for traditional organisations in today's date is challenging, unlike start-ups as they are just beginning or are only a few years into this journey. If they think about implementing and embedding security from day one, they will be much more secure in today's world. 

"Security is a position you take across the whole organization, has to be embedded into the products and services, awareness of your people, policies and systems, and equally embedded into your partner and supply chain and governed by overarching framework of ethics and values," added Chittilapilly.

Sharing a word of advice for start-ups, Chittilapilly said: "For every large enterprise today, the app is the brand. But more so for startups. If the startup is building an app or building a product, they have to think security as an entire design. You can't build the whole product and then think about how to secure it. Particularly in the application, as the cost of rewriting applications, whether it's a startup audits for a large enterprise is substantial. And for startups where the app is usually the biggest calling card on the world, a compromised app could mean the difference between survival and death. So think of security in the core design or design of everything you do."

Surprising in may sound, cybersecurity is the talk of the boardrooms today yet Indian organizations are far from being prepared. The findings of Cisco’s Cybersecurity Readiness Index states that only 24 per cent of organisations in India have the ‘mature’ level of readiness needed to be resilient against today’s modern cybersecurity risks. And about 38 per cent of companies in India fall into the Beginner or Formative stages. Cisco had classified the companies into four stages of increasing readiness: Beginner, Formative, Progressive and Mature. Beginner was for companies in the initial stages of deployment of solutions and Mature meant those who have achieved advanced stages of deployment and are most ready to address security risks.

While focusing on cybersecurity and addressing the skilling gap in this space, Cisco plans to skill 5,00,000 professionals in cybersecurity in India over the next three years. 

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