The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Indian, Australian experts to meet on IT security

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 06, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Indian, Australian experts to meet on IT security

K. Ramachandran

Legal issues, standards among subjects to be discussed Threat of electronic warfare can paralyse a country's capabilities in delivering services including power, gas, raid, road and air transport systems and financial or banking networks

CHENNAI: E-governance can be a highly efficient way of administering large numbers of people and delivering public services in a convenient and cost effective method. Simultaneously, it can lend transparency to public transactions and governance.

Governments generally seem to be spending time, money and effort for deploying large information networks with public access nodes to deliver services in convenient electronic form.

Connectivity and bandwidth are non-issues today, as information-communication technologies have broken both space and time barriers.

However, large-scale concerns remain to be addressed. The large network infrastructure provided by private and public sector agencies, government departments, financial organisations and massive public utilities are vulnerable to invidious capabilities that can obliterate, manipulate or impersonate any electronic information stored in computer databanks or delivered through huge networks.

The threat of electronic warfare tactic can paralyse a country's major capabilities in delivering services including power, gas, raid, road and air transport systems, and financial or banking networks.

It is in this scenario that an Indo-Australian conference on Information technology security (IACITS) is to be held in Chennai.

Researchers, academia, government officers, and experts from industry from India and Australia are assembling here to share their knowledge in I.T security for the meet titled "National information infrastructure protection-emerging imperatives."

It will be inaugurated on January 16 at IIT, Madras, by R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government.

The conference's general chairman, S.V. Raghavan said the IACITS conference was being jointly organised by the Australian Education international, India, the Australian High Commission, New Delhi and IIT, Madras.

From the delivery end of services to a consumer to the large databanks in government or private sector such as financial or banking organisations, there are a range of IT security issues to be discussed.

"One end can be solved by self regulation or normal data protection methods. At the other end, there might be need for legislations coupled with large-scale technology solutions. Also, given the diversity and enormity of the national information infrastructure, the country may need to look at security standards across the board to minimise the effort involved in transforming the nation.

All these are to be discussed by delegates in the meet, which hopes to come up with a national information infrastructure protection document," Dr. Raghavan said. Legal issues and security standards or NII protection would also form part of the discussion and final document, as also the role of industry and that of the local and provincial governments in securing national information infrastructure, notes Dr. Raghavan.

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