[ISN] Indian outsourcers push to boost data security

[InfoSec News]

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,93764,00.html

By Narayanan Madhavan
JUNE 10, 2004 
REUTERS

India's booming software and outsourcing sectors are trying to improve
data protection to please increasingly security-conscious clients and
to preempt protectionist laws, industry officials said today.

Officials at the National Association of Software and Service
Companies (NASSCOM) told a news conference that they will work with
customers, regulators and law enforcers to bolster "trustworthy
outsourcing" in India.

India, where English-speaking workers earn a fraction of what their
Western counterparts make, exported $12.5 billion worth of software
and services in the past year, up more than 30% from the previous
year. But protectionist laws have surfaced in some U.S. states to
prevent local governments from outsourcing back-office jobs to India,
while candidates in the U.S. presidential election have also spoken of
measures to check job losses.

U.S. lawmakers often cite security concerns about bank details and
medical records being transferred to foreign countries when
campaigning against outsourcing.

"There could be some legislation on data protection. I don't want to
wait for it to happen. I want to be proactive," said Kiran Karnik,
president of NASSCOM. "We have to watch that these [data issues] don't
become nontariff barriers."

Karnik said the industry association planned to encourage Indian
companies to share information on back-office workers, create a
certification authority for safety and plug gaps in Indian laws by
talking with Europe and the U.S.

A cybersecurity summit with the U.S. is planned for October, and
NASSCOM plans to replicate a cybersecurity lab it formed for police in
Bombay in other cities, Karnik said.

"India does not have a specific data protection act, but there are six
laws which cover about 98% of the requirements," said Sunil Mehta, a
vice president at NASSCOM.

Between March 2003 and this March, back-office work such as call
center operations and accounting services generated $3.6 billion in
revenue and 245,000 of the jobs in the sector, which employs 800,000
people overall.

NASSCOM said in a statement that a survey it commissioned found that
Indian companies have rarely faced any problems on data security. And,
despite an army of programmers, no major computer viruses have been
traced back to India, Karnik said.