After a power-packed day 1 of the Technology Sabha 2023, the second day began on a high note with technology leaders in the government and industry brainstorming on most sought after tech topics.
The day began with N Narayanamoorti, Chief Managing Director, Kerala State Electronics Development Corporation Limited (KELTRON), Government of Kerala taking the stage. He highlighted the multiple achievements and significant projects implemented by KELTRON. He said, “Keltron has executed and is executing multiple GIS-based projects. One of the most important is a smart garbage collection and management system. Further, a prestigious project called the ‘Safe Kerala’ project is also being done by Keltron.”
Following KELTRON’s presentation, Nitin Nair, Senior vice president, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) presented his views saying “ONDC is working towards enabling population scale inclusion of merchants and buyers. We are a network to democratize multiple domains across sectors.”
ONDC has been designed to solve key factors across the value chain holding back participation. The design revolves around two interrelated principles – Unbundling of customers and sellers aquisition to reduce go-to-market efforts and interoperability between platforms/ applications for greater market access, he added.
Sajiv Nair, Asst. CTO & Head Management Services, ESDS and Col. Deepak Anand, CEO Public Services, ESDS addressed the audience on the topic of Secured Digital India. He mentioned saying “the rise in digitization and new applications is changing technology, the security environment, and stringent regulatory needs.” He further said, “ ESDS is the first Indian cloud company to have a patent in vertically auto-scalable cloud technology.”
The next was a brainstorming session comprising Central government representatives focused on ‘Taking citizen services to the next level.’ The panel discussion was moderated by Srikanth RP, Editor, Express Computer.
Sanjeev Banzal, Director General, Education & Research Network (ERNET), India opened the discussion with points on digitalisation of the education sector. He mentioned that digitalization posed a boon for the healthcare and education sectors during the pandemic. “In Himachal Pradesh, we have connected over 400 schools digitally using several district centers. Therefore, one teacher can teach multiple students across all the connected schools in that district,” he added.
Corresponding to Sanjeev Banzal’s words, Sharat Sahal Mathur, Group General Manager (CCCO), Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) said, “We are in a phase where we can provide e-services effectively and efficiently. Today citizens expect more from e-governance.” Highlighting the use of technology to prevent accidents, he said that “we have developed ‘Kawach’, a device that we install in trains to help reduce the risk of accidents.”
Sharing digital initiatives by the Government of West Bengal, Dr. Abhishek Roy, Head – SeMT, Department of Personnel & Administrative Reforms & e-Gov, Government of West Bengal said, “The state government has already started a scheme to bring government to the doorstep wherein citizens need not visit government offices and can avail e-services from their homes.”
He added, “Moving forward we aim to have predictive governance. We have already started a project for birth certificates using Blockchain. The entire data from birth till death will be there in the Blockchain.”
Piyush Somani, Founder, CMD & CEO, ESDS Software Solution Ltd. said, “In the past five to six years we have moved to a phase where people are not questioning cloud or other digital services. The majority of smart cities in India have gone foul. Those who succeeded in the leadership tried to reinvent the wheel and therefore the growth gets hampered. Therefore, there has to be a central record keeping that could help the new leadership continue from where it was earlier left.”
While sharing his perspective on ‘A new approach to Observability’, Ramprasad B, Lead Pre-Sales, Rakuten SixthSense said, “There are three pillars of observability – Metrics, Traces, and Logs. Observability helps in better visibility, real-time troubleshooting, customer experience, and optimisation of business operations. Rakuten Sixthsense Observability dashboard helps the user monitor multiple assets on a single dashboard.”
Mayank Gupta, General Manager, Newgen Software, delivered the address on New-Age Governance; Must Haves to Look Out For. He stated that the must-haves for New-Age governance are citizen experience, intelligent automation, digital workplace, cloud-first strategy, and data modernization. He added that “the Newgen is a unified portal that runs on a citizen experience management framework.” “We provide a low-code application for data encryption and image size optimization.”
Sanjeev Bungeri, Senior Manager – Solution Support, D-Link (India) Ltd. took over the dais and addressed the gathering on ‘A Reliable Network Infrastructure: The foundation for ICT-driven Governance and Services Delivery’. Further, he highlighted the significance of appropriate cabling and emphasised that “we need to ensure that the cabling that we use while installing LED lights, computers, wifi routers or other such devices, supports the standard PoE.”
However, shedding light on D-Link’s products and services, Bungeri said, “We offer solutions ranging from switching to network management software, wireless LAN, structured cabling solutions, and network enclosures.”
The topic of building a secure IT infrastructure was elaborated by KB Senthilkumar, Scientist, F/Associate Director, Cybersecurity Group, CDAC, Thiruvananthapuram. He stated that “common mistakes that lead to cyber attacks are being unaware of your assets; identifying your assets according to your business will help you maintain a better security infrastructure.” In order to avoid and reduce your risk in any business, have a multi-layer defense mechanism,” he added.
To conclude the three-day 33rd Edition of Technology Sabha on a high note, Manoj Abraham, Addnl Director General of Police, Government of Kerala deliberated on ‘Mindset/Skillset to handle future cyber threats’. He said, “Perfect cybersecurity doesn’t exist. It’s a constant cat & mouse chase where enterprises need to update and reinforce their cybersecurity infrastructure time and again to ensure they stay ahead of cybercriminals.”
“Cyberwarfare is the new warfare strategy that is much more dangerous than traditional warfare… Ransomware-as-a-service is available in today on the dark net therefore attacks are being outsourced. Hence, it has become imperative for governments and enterprises to safeguard their systems, networks, and data in a more effective way,” he added.
Sharing a few statistics to back up his words and spread awareness on cybersecurity, Abraham mentioned that nearly 93 percent of data breaches occur due to social engineering attacks. Approximately 43 percent of cyber attacks target small businesses.
In his concluding note, he underlined that “it has to be an integrated approach towards cybersecurity wherein the software, hardware, and the human element has to come together to fight cyber threats.”