Is investment into security just for peace of mind!

The number of data breaches is rising; worldwide attacks against businesses have almost doubled in five years according to the World Economic Forum. So why aren’t executives and boards responding to these rising threats? The Make in India and Digital India initiatives aim to blend the digital and physical worlds by uniting people, services, and devices. This requires seamless last mile connectivity, which can be enabled by a robust, reliable Wi-Fi infrastructure. This infrastructure can also enable the delivery of vocational/professional training to citizens, thereby driving employability and entrepreneurship. Moreover, the Wi-Fi infrastructure can offer services beyond connectivity, including Location Services, Emergency Response Systems, and Crowd Management.

56% of 1,379 incidents with specific malware functionality were ransomware from 2018. Identifying 53K+ incidents in only 12 months suggests an information security dystopia, an uneven playing field where the bad guys consistently win out. And, the 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is full of nefarious events by offenders, both known and unknown.

 
668 breaches compromised 22,408,258 records between January 1 and July 2, 2018, as per Ponemon Institute. This year’s study reports the global average cost of a data breach to be up 6.4 percent over the previous year to $3.86 million. The average cost for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information also increased by 4.8 percent year over year to $148.

 
Organizations are asking themselves - why attackers are so successful in stealing online data. They are confidently winning in spite of increasing security investments. There’s little doubt that the dark side of the internet is winning at attacking, breaching, and exfiltrating corporate data from too many businesses. In order to combat cybercriminals, investments into security and cyber security in every organizations are increasing continuously.


But are these investments effective?
 
India is set to become one of the largest consumers of Wi-Fi outdoor solutions in the foreseeable future. The Wi-Fi infrastructure will offer services beyond connectivity, including Location Services, Emergency Response Systems, and Crowd Management. The most popular, JAM – jan-dhan, Aadhar, and mobile-connectivity have been hailed as the building blocks for economic growth as we march towards being a $3 trillion economy by 2020.  Ubiquitous data connectivity will play a big role in this growth story. Many Indian and multi-national companies including Cisco, HPE, Cambium Networks and a few other brands have started their manufacturing process in India to fill the large demand.

As the demand increases, newer product sand solutions are getting invented to complement the technology, but it is difficult to say whether it will give100% security proof. A question also arises on whether the most popular app, Gmail is safe and secure or not?