Digital India – Are we ready?

Technology has transformed the core infrastructure of how a business function. Information is easily accessible to end consumers and business processes have been optimized. New innovative Business models have emerged and employee can connect to corporate network remotely.

India is facing a significant change across industry segments too. A lot of services are going online and proving to be beneficial for the citizens. By increasing the IT penetration, the new wave ‘Digital India’ is expected to facelift Urban and Rural regions.

As we get ready for the digital transformation, we also need to ensure our infrastructure is in place. 856 million people out of India’s 1,324 billion population live in rural areas. The number of internet users in rural areas is likely to reach 210 million in 2018. The overall internet user base is expected to be over 500 million and mobile Internet users are likely to constitute between 70 percent and 80 percent of the total online population by 2018.

But, India has the slowest Internet in Asia. Only 8% of all internet connections classify as High-speed broadband connections (>=4MBPS). The lack of infrastructure to handle huge demands generated from online channels was the key reason for the eCommerce bubble burst in 2000.

The move of the monetary transaction from offline to online has also led to increased data security and privacy concerns. To provide a foolproof solution to consumers, security needs to be enabled at both Infrastructure (hardware) and application (software) levels. Organizations need to deploy policy-enforced controls to secure mobile access for BYOD users and protect Business data both at rest and in-flight.