Tech Observer magazine in association with American virtual infrastructure giant VMware organised a special webinar focused on Security Operations Center to create awareness and promote modern technology for strengthening cybersecurity.
During an hour-long keynote presentation and panel discussion, senior government officials and technology experts emphasised the growing importance of having Security Operation Center (SOC) and Network Operation Centre (NOC) to mitigate the modern-day cybersecurity challenges.
While delivering opening remarks, Nilesh Goradia, Presales Leader Systems Engineering, Partner & SI India, VMware said that IT infrastructures have become more vital during the ongoing pandemic as demands placed on the digital infrastructure have skyrocketed.
“Security is no more an afterthought. As far as today's digital world is concerned, people are considering intrinsic security and zero-trust framework to make their digital transformation better, agile and secure,” Goradia said.
According to him, this new push towards digitalisation has also increased the surface for cyber-attacks, so public sector organisations and enterprises need to have an integrated centre for managing cybersecurity risk.
“SOCs have proven to be a great strategy to mitigate the cybersecurity challenge as they offer better visibility to continuously monitor and improve security posture while preventing, detecting, analysing, and responding to cybersecurity incidents,” said Goradia.
Agreeing with Goradia, Stephen N D'Souza, Senior Systems Engineer – NSA, VMware India, during his presentation, explained how VMware's technology helps public sector organisations strengthen their cybersecurity posture.
He said that having an integrated cybersecurity framework is easier said than done because a typical SOC infrastructure is full of heterogeneity. It includes firewalls, IPS/IDS, breach detection solutions, probes, security information and event management (SIEM) system.
“All of these have to be mapped with the right technology to collect data for correlation and analyses,” he said, adding that VMware's Carbon Black enables such visibility.
“We are trying to bring in something which is increasingly built into the system rather than some separate solution,” he added.
As part of the webinar, a panel discussion on Recalibrating Security Operations Centre in New Normal was moderated by Ankush Kumar, Editor, Tech Observer.
Senior government officials and technology experts including Secretary IT of Odisha Manoj Kumar Mishra; DIG (IT) of Border Security Force (BSF) Arvind Dutt Abdali; Dr Balsing Rajput, Superintendent of Police, Maharashtra Cyber of Maharashtra Police; A.P. Singh, SE (IT), Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited, Government of Uttar Pradesh; Mohit Makol, Director, Tecmee Technologies; and Nilesh Goradia of VMware participated in the discussion.
Participating in the panel discussion, A. P. Singh of UPPCL said that his organisation has data centres, some workload in cloud and IT systems are highly diversified at several places.
According to him, such a system does create complexity from a security point of view, and robust technical oversight does help mitigate any cybersecurity risk; however, SOC can further strengthen the overall security posture by providing greater visibility.
Sharing his views, Arvind Dutt Abdali of BSF said that new types of attacks are emerging fast due to technology proliferation.
“There is a growing reliance on a centralised system where access is given on need-to-know and role bais to minimise security risk,” he said adding that SOC has potential to pep-up security, but it must be made affordable and should be available in a plug-and-play mode so that smaller SOC could be created by all types of organisations.
Participating in the panel discussion, Dr Balsing Rajput of Maharashtra Police stated that in government most of the things are happening on a project basis and that creates a lot of silos — compute, storage and networking — infrastructure.
“We have to look into an integrated and competency approach. Presently, most of the organisations in government do not have that. Therefore, we have different verticals, different projects and different systems,” Rajput said, adding that an integrated SOC/NOC like system will offer greater visibility and security.
Sharing his views during the panel discussion, Mohit Makol, Director and CTO, TecMee Technologies said: “Pandemic has brought some of the known issues back into the contention because suddenly the entire paradigm of security posture has changed for most of the organisations.”
On security, he said that assessing the entire security infrastructure from supply chain to third party vendors to partners have become important to mitigate the emerging security risk.
Stating that ensuring robust security is an ecosystem effort, Goradia of VMware said: “It starts with what is already existing, plus what the technology vendor can add to that. Because threats are always evolving and the landscape of information access is continuously widening. So it would never be a one technology. It has to be an ecosystem answer. That is where the partnership becomes very important that you have the right set of technology, and you know how to implement it.”
