Anand Naik, Managing Director – Sales, India and SAARC, Symantec Corporation, talked about the explosion of data and its management. “The consumerization of IT has been the biggest trend so far, followed by virtualization. With this, the data created is in zettabytes, which needs to be managed. Moreover, we have to ensure that the digital information that we are generating today remains available for the next twenty to thirty years,” said Naik.
He explained how the Cloud, although treated as a threat by the government, was actually being used by it for storing data. “The NIC data center stores data on the Cloud at the NIC premises,” he explained.
Naik stated that the advantages of the Cloud were related to the management of digital assets. “Land records, for example, have to be stored in perpetuity and can never be deleted. Hence, we have to create policies around saving data and its lifecycle,” he added.
Talking about the various threats to data, he said that, besides a Web site being hacked or records being manipulated, there were other threats to critical infrastructure and attacks could come, not just from external sources, but also internal ones. The question then arises as to how an organization goes about protecting data from its own employees.
Given that the most common form of attack is targeted spam, about 25% of the computers that are used to launch these attacks are from tier 2 and 3 cities.
“The question that we all need to ask ourselves is, is my data protected? We need to ensure the security of our information as well as that of consumers,” he concluded.
