2016 was a big year for India as a digital nation. It was the year that saw the country leapfrog the U.S., both as the second largest smartphone market and the second largest internet user base. Greater technological adoption was witnessed throughout the country, as businesses and consumers alike migrated en masse onto the digital medium to reap rich dividends that technology brings. This mass adoption of tech saw a particularly exponential increase in scale towards the end of the year, thanks in large part to the government’s initiative of demonetising high-denomination currency notes. Fintech players as well as digital payments initiatives from National Payment Cooperation of India (NPCI) such as RuPay, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), and National Unified USSD Platform (NUUP) all registered massive growth in transactional numbers. Sounds like great news for the Digital India vision, doesn’t it?

Consider then, a few bits of information that will take some of the gloss off the year that has just passed. According to a 2016 India Spend report, cybercrime in India has increased by 19 times over the last decade. Even individuals and organisations in the public realm are not safe. The twitter handles of Rahul Gandhi and the Indian National Congress (INC) were hacked this year, while several top banks across the country such as HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank, Axis Bank, and SBI were hit by large-scale debit card hacks that is estimated to have impacted more than three million debit card users. Serious security vulnerabilities have also been reported on multiple occasions about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal app, which has been installed by more than 50 lakh users at last count.

These major incidents, a few in a long line of events, serve to highlight what is possibly the biggest threat to the vision of a completely digital India – a lack of focus on cyber security.

The country, despite being amongst the global top three when it comes to cyber attacks and data breaches, fares pretty poorly on the security index. Nearly a third of the organisations operating in the country are not familiar with the concept of cyber security, while confidential personal information is freely shared on the web and social media by more than 90 percent of young Indians today. Security loopholes are constantly being explored and exploited, as digital systems earlier considered secure are increasingly found out to be relics that failed to evolve at the same pace as the cyber threats that they currently face. With more and more first-time users coming to terms with digital tech in the form of online transactions and social media, cyber criminals have an unparalleled opportunity to wreak mayhem and bring India to its knees.

"Security loopholes are constantly being explored and exploited, as digital systems earlier considered secure are now out-dated and fail to evolve with the modern day cyber threats".

This is where routine security audits come into the picture. By evaluating the entire digital framework as well as human components associated with it from time to time, security audits can help the government and private organisations in identifying and addressing the vulnerabilities that exist within the system and minimise the threat risk. Conducting audits at regular intervals will also help in keeping the overall security relevant and current, and can play a major role in keeping IT infrastructure protected from any new threats. Data and information privacy will also receive a substantial boost as a result, reducing the probability of misuse of constitutionally-enabled rights by malicious entities through critical data compromises. This will go a long way in mitigating the hesitation that currently exists in the minds of the people when it comes to digital technology, thereby promoting greater participation and more inclusivity.

The world is no longer going digital, and the reason it is no longer going digital is because it already has. Communication, commerce, information, transactions, leisure – technology has already become a key driver for any and all functions for individual users as well as organisations. The Digital India initiative is meant to leverage tech and inter connectivity to provide better facilities and standard of living to 1.3 billion citizens across geographical boundaries, whilst in the process also transforming the country into a $20 trillion economy. This ambitious aim will only succeed if robust security measures are at the core of the entire interconnected framework that has been envisioned. This would require continuous security auditing in order to identify threats and respond to them in real-time. Vigilance was once held to be the price of freedom, and within today’s rapidly-evolving world, the statement rings truer than ever.