Taken for a Ride

Before the 65-hour terror siege of Mumbai, thousands of people have been
killed and affected, but they have mostly been the common people in market
places and railway stations. Nobody cries for them, nobody bothers to change the
rules of the game for them. But this time the high and mighty have been touched,
and there is so much hue and cry. The country is shocked, but perhaps this is a
good time to push for some hard decisions.

 Imagine the amount of loss and destruction if these mindless terrorists had
taken over some of the large IT campuses or BPO centers in the countryin
Mumbai, Gurgaon or Chennai. I dread to think but hundreds of young and bright
people could have been killed. And so many of those data centers serving global
customers would have been destroyed. What is the level of protection in these
places? It would sound very cruel to mention this now, but we all know that
human resource is the most crucial for this industry.

Ibrahim Ahmad ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in

The ICT industry that has a relatively higher degree of knowledge about
modern security concepts and technologies, should take a lead in securing their
own premises, and thus set an example for others in the country. This will also
send a re-assuring message to customers the world over, that we have the best
security and their operations are safe here.

As threats to security grow more high-tech (emails, GPS devices, and
satellite phones), there is increasing need to make employees as well as common
people more sensitive to security. They must be made to realize that attacks
much bigger than this can be perpetrated as dependence on IT and communications
increases. Without crossing our borders for suicide attacks, if terrorists can
use Internet to make a big passenger plane crash into the BSE building, just
imagine the level of catastropheboth human as well as economic. At a recent
seminar on Web security CIOs strongly harped upon an urgent need to sensitize
employees about how important security is.

Finally, I think the idea of stop paying taxes is interesting. Most of the
politicians and bureaucrats are like parasites on the tax-payers money, a lot
of which is coming from thousands of ICT companies and millions of employees
working there. Most of the politicians and bureaucrats are either criminals or
corrupt, and often a mix of both. On top of this, there is a huge infrastructure
of security personnel to protect them. Clearly Indians are being taken for a
ride and its time to bring this to an end. The industry, for instance, could pay
that much money directly to fund infrastructure, power and security projects.

I wish and pray that these bad times and hardships finally help us as
citizens and a nation to come out stronger. I am sure our enemies did not think
of this.