The Cyber space, a virtual universe expanding at an enormous pace, is a key enabler defining the growth of a nation and development across the globe. In the current era of virtualized world, where activities on the cyberspace involve a diverse set of stakeholders and touches almost all the dimensions of life in one way or other. This leads it to be symbolized as the life line of ever connected world. With the broaden horizon of the cyberspace along with its increased criticality, threat landscape has also expanded exponentially. For exploiting the cyberspace up to its full extent, health of cyberspace must be considered and undertaken on the priority. Parameters defining the health could range from confidentiality, integrity and reliability of information assets, to competence of cyberspace in providing secured ecosystem for critical information infrastructure operations, or could range to an extreme i.e. the capability to handle cyber wars.
Health of cyber space could also be attributed to the preparedness of various stakeholders such as individuals using the cyberspace, organizations offering services and products to the end users or to other organizations, security market players providing services and products to protect users from threat and vulnerabilities and policy makers providing umbrella coverage for the secured and healthy cyber ecosystem.
End users are most vulnerable stakeholders and are targeted to victimize directly or used to carry out attacks on others. Reasons could be lack of awareness, less access to the security technology or ignorance also. These reasons are required to be addressed by the concerned parties such as corporate providing services on cyberspace, security players, and policy makers; they must put in place some motivational factors to drive the users towards a secured usage along with available technological measures. Strengthening the end points is the key for a healthy cyberspace; and backbone providers of cyberspace such as TSPs and ISPs could play a crucial role in promoting security at the end users. These providers are linked to the final service delivery point and could have significant visibility over them and thus could aid a lot in promoting security.
Role of corporate also very crucial to maintain a healthier cyber space, as they may possess huge amount of sensitive information of their customer and business, loss of which could create huge impact, not only restricted to the business but also affect cyber health of the country. Given the globalized flow of information, Organizations are not only required to protect their assets within their parameters but develop data protection policies and programs that help recognize and minimize cyber security threats, resulting within their and beyond. Lack of Intelligent Information flow between the organizations is possibly one of the biggest hindrances that stop them from achieving this. Inclination of corporate intrinsic security and national security requirements for cyber space is not in the same line, keeping objective of corporate to serve their customer on its prime priority; there is an expectation from corporate to undertake the objectives of making a healthy cyberspace at national level.
To strengthen the overall cyber ecosystem, security services and products provider’s involvement is also very essential. These security players are engaged in technological advancement and R&D to cater the market demand for security. Engagement with security players at strategic tactical and operational level would be a way to make a healthier cyberspace and aid its various stakeholders with the advanced technologies in the customized, flexible and accessible manner, based on the user profile. Security players are required to cater the security requirements for legacy systems, interoperability concerns etc which also match the applicable regulatory requirements.
The overall coverage to the cyberspace is provided by the Policy makers. They are aimed to align the activities of all the stakeholders with the end objective of establishing a robust cyber ecosystem, so as everybody can explore it for their benefit in the positive way. Policy makers aggregate and undertake perennial and evolving challenges present in the ecosystem. This would help respond to the issues in the pragmatic, agile and responsive manner.
A healthy cyberspace could be established with the seamless integration and shared responsibilities among all the stakeholders and facilitators. This would aid utilizing the cyberspace and contribute in the overall growth of nation and development across the globe.