Survey: BYOD puts Indian firms at risk

BANGALORE--Over 50 percent of IT managers in India believe their systems cannot adequately protect their network from employees who bring and use their own devices at work.

According to a survey jointly conducted by Data Security Council of India (DSCI) and Cisco Systems, 53 percent of respondents believed corporate networks were not competently withstand sophisticated, targeted, and persistent threats. Key findings from the survey were revealed during a media conference held here Wednesday. Entitled "Reinventing the network in the context of security", the study polled 90 security managers and CIOs about the threats of bring-your-own-device (BYOD), mobility, and virtualization trends.

Some 53 percent of respondents said they did not have the capability to integrate external and internal intelligence to combat attacks. Another 56 percent said current tools could not manage security requirements of mobile, BYOD, and virtualization. 

According to the study, 44 percent of security managers allowed employees to select and use a specific set of personally owned devices.

DSCI's data protection director, Vinayak Godse, said these new technologies fall outside the boundaries of traditional Indian security policies, which are based on securing a particular asset or the IP address itself.

"Current existing capabilities may not be able to understand this requirement and as such, they need to look at the context of the device itself," Godse noted.

The DSCI was set up as an independent self-regulatory organization by industry body, Nasscom, to promote data protection. The council is also preparing a "reference architecture" to raise awareness about the issue. Cisco will also contribute to the reference architecture, said executives at the media briefing.