Google announces cyber security upskilling program for 100,000 developers in India

Search and internet major, Google India, announced a campaign to upskill cyber security researchers and developers in the country. The campaign will be part of the company’s Cyber Security Roadshow, which will cover multiple cities across India and offer tools, tutorials and mentorship on security practices for building consumer apps — as well as enterprise programs.

The upskilling program will target 1 lakh developers in India, and will cover two broad divisions within the program — Android and Google Cloud. While the Android upskilling program will cater to developers building apps for consumers, the Google Cloud upskilling program will target enterprise developers and security administrators.

Saikat Mitra, senior director, and head of trust and safety at Google Asia-Pacific, cited a Norton report to state that the volume of cyber attacks across consumer and enterprise services in India amount to over 2 lakh breaches everyday. “This makes it imperative for us to improve our security standards. This can be done by identifying threats at the root level, which can help prevent the misuse of our platforms,” Mitra said.

An enterprise developer, who works with a leading private-sector bank in India, said on condition of anonymity that the upskilling initiative could help mainstream developers in India become more aware of Google Cloud’s latest developer features. “For most developers in India, features of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platforms are more visible and apparent. Google’s program may help with this,” the developer said.

Google’s initiative comes as industry stakeholders have highlighted a lack of adequate upskilling standards among developers in the country. Earlier this month, Vijendra Katiyar, country manager of India and SAARC at US-based cyber security firm Trend Micro, told Mint that while the levels of sophistication of cyber threats and even security tools have grown, a wide base of security professionals have not managed to keep up with the standards.

This, according to experts, could help companies identify the right cyber security professionals. According to executives working with cyber security firms in India, even amid higher salaries being offered to developers with cyber security skills, thousands of jobs have remained vacant as companies have struggled to find adequate talent for their roles.

Siva Prasad N., chief business officer of staffing services firm Teamlease Digital, said earlier this month that over 70,000 cyber security jobs remain vacant in India as of this month. In March this year, a report by Microsoft’s corporate vice-president of security, compliance, identity and management, Vasu Jakkal, said that over 2.5 million cyber security jobs are vacant due to the lack of adequate industry talent in India — which upskilling initiatives seek to fulfill.

Alongside the upskilling initiative, Google also announced an awareness campaign to promote transaction safety in India, and announced a $2 million grant for non-profit organizations to build cyber safety tools for “high-risk communities”.