BEL partners with Cisco to secure its digital infrastructure

Government-owned aerospace and defence electronics company, Bharat Electronics Limited, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with American IT networking firm Cisco to scale up its services in the areas of networking, collaboration and security, among other associated services. 

Bhanu Prakash Srivastava, Chairman & Managing Director, BEL, said: “This strategic partnership will provide BEL access to Cisco technology, which includes enterprise networks, advanced wireless technology, security, data centre network, etc." He added that it will also facilitate joint customisation and product lifecycle management for BEL’s various projects and enable the company to build state-of-the-art technology architecture for key industry verticals.”  

Additionally, Cisco will explore the establishment of a Cisco Network Training Academy at the BEL Academy for Excellence (Nalanda), Bengaluru.  

Our partnership with BEL is a significant step in our endeavour to accelerate innovation, infrastructure modernisation, and capability building across critical industry segments, said Daisy Chittilapilly, President, Cisco India & SAARC. She added that the partnership will enable the two companies to forge new possibilities and outcomes for their customers in India. 

India has been one of the most vulnerable countries to cyber-attacks since the pandemic, as a staggering 68% of companies in the country have experienced some form of attack on their data, cyber security firm Sophos said in a report published in October 2022.

According to a report published by cybersecurity firm CloudSEK on December 30, government and public sector organisations in India suffered the highest number of cyber-attacks at 82 in the year 2022, along with China, USA and Indonesia. The figure was up eight-fold over the previous year. 

In April, government-owned oil supplier Oil India Ltd reported a cyberattack on information technology (IT) systems in a facility in Duliajan in Assam. According to media reports, hackers demanded ransom worth $7.5 million in Bitcoins from the public secretary undertaking (PSU). 

In November, one of India’s top government-run hospitals, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi was hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted most of its online services for over two weeks. The hospital was forced to shut down its servers and switch to manual operations for inpatient, and outpatient services.  

Following the cyberattack on AIIMS, officials at Safdarjung Hospital, another Delhi-based government hospital suffered a cyber-attack in mid-November. Authorities said that the hospital servers went down for around 12 hours due to the attack but was able to revive the systems on the same day. The attack was detected on November 14 after hospital employees found that they could not log into their systems.  
Same month, India’s second-largest depository, Central Depository Services Limited (CDSL) detected a malware attack on few of its systems. 

At the Digital India Summit in Delhi that took place on February 20-21, Lieutenant General Rajesh Pant, national cybersecurity coordinator said that the National Cyber Security Strategy 2023 is likely to come out soon following the formation of a task force.

According to PwC’s Global Digital Trust Insights released in November 2022, 82% of business executives in India expect their cyber security budget to increase by 2023. According to the survey, 66% of these executives believe cyber criminals will have a greater impact on their organisation in 2023 than they did in 2022.