As per Daisy Chittilapilly, president of Cisco India & SAARC, India is the world's fastest growing digital nation, and 5G technology will increase the number of people who are online. However, she warned that there is a "digital trust" gap that, if not addressed, can "delay or derail" the country's digital transformation.

"If you look at India's digital banking and payment systems, as per an NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) report, in January of 2023, we had a billion transactions... If you look at our small and medium business, they are digitising at a faster-than-ever pace and Covid played a big role in that," Chittilapilly said on Monday. "E-commerce is equally creating value for India. It is no different for healthcare or education. India is already the second-largest free education market outside the US."

She was speaking to reporters on the same day that Cisco announced the establishment of a new data centre in Chennai and the upgrade of an existing one in Mumbai to provide customers with enhanced security solutions, as the global telecom gear maker doubles down on its commitment to India.

The American firm announced security innovations and investments in the country's security infrastructure to help organisations become more resilient and address cybersecurity risks in a hybrid world.

According to Chittilapilly, a recent Cisco survey found that 80% of surveyed organisations in India had experienced a security incident in the last couple of years, with the cost of restoring normal operations totaling more than $1 million. "This is typically the amount paid to technology providers, advisors, and vendors in order to return to normalcy. It does not usually account for long-term loss, reputation loss, data loss, or intellectual property loss "She stated.

Cisco Talos, the company's commercial threat detection engine, has seen an increase in malicious activity in India over the last year, specifically targeting critical facilities, infrastructure, and personnel.

"It is clearly very daunting for all of us to take note of a clear gap in digital trust, leading to a gap in cyber resilience," said Chittilapilly.

Forecast by a top Cisco India executive, organisations will increasingly move their workloads to the cloud over the next two to five years, while also digitising and automating each point of the supply chain.

"However, these interconnected ecosystems breed complexity, which leads to security challenges... today, trust is something that depends on security and transparency across the organisation, across products and services, across people and processes, across partners and suppliers," Chittilapilly explained.

She cited an IoT analytics study that predicted the world would have 27 billion connected devices by 2025. "This will also occur in India in some form. And there is always an answer to the complexity of each of these devices' security "she stated.