Hyderabad: The Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence (CoE), established by Telangana Government and Data Security Council of India (DSCI) and backed by Nasscom, will be incubating startups both from within India and overseas to drive innovations.
Sharing the plans, Dr Sriram Birudavolu, CEO, Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence (CoE), DSCI told Telangana Today, “There are at least 500 sub-domains in the cybersecurity space. We want to build the startup ecosystem here. Incubator is going to be one of our major flagship initiatives. We will shortlist startups, nurture and train/mentor them as well as provide them future roadmap, access to funding, data and markets, and collaborations. Several stakeholders will pitch in to create the real hub for cybersecurity here. We will also nurture startups and talent from the tier-2 and tier-3 cities within Telangana. The State is a visionary and is at the forefront of cybersecurity readiness, with a dedicated policy for cybsersecurity.”
The CoE will focus on the entire gamut of cybersecurity from network level to chip, applications, mobile apps, social media and internet. Frameworks, policies, recommendations, tools, standards, services and products will help the digital ecosystem to evolve. In the absence of which, policies and schemes of the Central government towards digitisation could pose risk in terms of implementation.
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“The CoE is unique and is the first of its kind in the country. The Board of Directors of the CoE comprises of Telangana IT principal secretary Jayesh Ranjan, NIIT founder Rajendra Singh Pawar, Managing Director, Country Digital Acceleration at Cisco APJC Anil Nair and other stalwarts from the industry, Meity and National Cybsersecurity Secretariat. We are also going to work closely with regulatory and law enforcement agencies worldwide.”
Advantage Telangana
Rama Vedashree, CEO, DSCI, said, “Nasscom and DSCI want to make India a global hub for cybsesecurity and to grow this vertical to a $35 billion industry, which is roughly 10 per cent of the overall IT industry. There are several industry constituents that need to grow-product industry and startups, and services industry. The aim is also to attract global corporations to set up operations in India and Hyderabad. We need to grow the footprint of these corporations in India. We should also enhance the critical readiness of user industries across verticals, and government bodies/agencies. We want Telangana to become the preferred investment destination for cybsersecurity companies to create security operation centres (SOCs) and centres of excellence (COE).”
She added, “The CoE creates a broader platform for multiple stakeholders to collaborate. Hyderabad has several global development centres focusing on cybsersecurity creating the base to build capacity further. The city doesn’t have to start from zero. There is also a good base of academia. National Policy Academy and Cyberabad Police are already driving cyber forensics. Not many States have such capabilities. Defence labs in the city also enable defence security capabilities. T-Hub is already driving startup ecosystem. The CoE will help to nurture more product startups in the cybersecurity space.”
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Focus areas
The CoE will have five pillars/focus areas. It will focus on Industry- Large, MSMEs and Startups. There will be an incubation space to host cybersecurity startups. There will be focus on Government-Central, State, Law Enforcement, Defence and Policy Making. Third pillar is Academia and R&D – to run academic and research programmes and setting up cybersecurity CoEs in various institutes.
“We want to address the supply gap. We need to scale up our talent pool,” emphasizes Dr Birudavolu.
The fourth pillar will be User Groups-with focus on user industries such as banking, healthcare, agriculture, automotive, energy and utilities. “We are the use case clearing house, where we extract critical use cases and share it with startups and industry to develop advanced solutions,” he informed.
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There will also be Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Government (B2G) user awareness in cybersecurity programmes directly or through other national agencies. The last and the fifth pillar will focus on collaborations among various stakeholders-industry bodies, accelerators and startups.
“The CoE is also partnering with Russia and UK agencies and national institutions for mutual benefit. We have also signed with Osmania University and few corporations. More collaboration is lined up,” he added.