India to train thousands more cyberpolice
Training centres for thousands more cyberpolice are planned in India as the country's IT industry tries to boost its security credentials.
The president of Indian IT industry group Nasscom, Som Mittal, said the association plans to open a further six cyberlabs to provide technology training for police in places such as Calcutta and Delhi, and 220,000 technology employees have already signed up for the National Skills Registry (NSR) — India's background-check database.
Cyberlabs in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune have already trained up 4,000 police officers in technology crime since they were set up about four and a half years ago.
Mittal said that, with large outsourcers employing about 60,000 people, Nasscom was continuing to push employers to pressure workers to sign up to the NSR, which allows background and ID checks linked to fingerprints.
The growing confidence in the ability of outsourcers to provide data security marks a shift in perception. A survey by analyst firm Gartner in 2005 that found security and privacy were once the biggest fears among companies considering outsourcing.
Mittal told ZDNet.co.uk sister site silicon.com that outsourcing companies were able to implement higher standards of data security because they could easily set up rigorous new procedures, could invest more in policies using revenues from multiple contracts, had experience of meeting high security demands from different companies and there was less resistance to security checks among staff.
Mittal said: "We are putting together terms of best practice and sharing those answers to ensure that what we deliver in terms of service is as secure as possible."
Mittal said the cyberlab training meant suspects were regularly being picked up for crimes such as intellectual-property infringement.
"In yesteryear, price and quality were very important criteria; today security practices are taken seriously by management as well," said Mittal.
Nasscom has also helped set up a cybercrime watchdog, the Data Security Council of India, which is a self-regulatory member organisation.