It’s a sunny day in Bangalore and we are heading to Chennai to meet Sify CEO Rajsekhar Ramaraj. Our flight has delayed and my colleague and me had to wait for two-hours. Reason: Foggy weather blocking all take-offs in Kolkata—from where our flight had to arrive.

Thoughts kicked off and one of them started to rack my brains. Isn’t fog detection in a sense like a security threat? Flights cannot take off until the fog gets cleared. Likewise enterprise cannot operate under virus attacks. Work comes to halt and network goes down until the system administrator gets to the fix the jinx. Is there any panacea?

Security concern among Indian corporate is very high. Information security spending, though low, is increasing. The manufacturing sector plans to invest in elementary security systems, while the banking, financial, BPO and IT services sectors continue to invest in intrusion prevention systems, firewalls, network monitoring tools and system audit tools.
However, we should note that most organizations avoid spending money on security unless there is a compelling business reason. It is more so the case in large number of small and medium enterprises. Many organizations wait until an incident hits them before placing counter-measures.

Last year, a leading software services firm, came under attack from an unknown computer virus affecting all network-dependent work of thousands of IT professionals for couple of hours.

In our own small little office, our system administrator spends a lot of time fixing problems on individual systems. In most of the cases the problem is virus or Trojan related. Even having the best of anti-virus tools hasn’t addressed our concerns, or anyone’s. And every day you will have to deal with junk mails, which choke the inboxes.