How Indusface’s AppTrana Cloud WAF helped NASSCOM adapt to the changes in security landscape amidst the global pandemic
As the apex body for the $194-billion Indian technology industry, the biggest challenge for NASSCOM has been its high online visibility that translates into higher risk of being subjected to security attacks and threats. And, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with the drastic change in the security landscape brought in a huge volume of unwanted traffic. Anirban Mandal, Deputy Director, Technology, NASSCOM, says, “While we had just one or two incidents of security breach, it prompted us to rethink our security posture, especially with regards to applications security. We did not want NASSCOM to be the subject of a high risk security breach to strengthen our cyber security.”
Anirban says they arrived at the decision to strengthen their security even though they knew it would not be an easy task considering there were 15 different applications with more than 15 partners working on them. “So, we needed to align with our partners and get them onboarded,” he says. The other focus area and concern for NASSCOM was a security solution that could be managed by its lean IT team. He explains, “When we decided to look for a security solution, we realised that the solution should be robust and at the same time easy to manage. We didn’t want a dependency on the solution provider to tell what our risk appetite was. Because, at the end of the day, as an organisation, we know it better than an external organisation on what our risks are.” Anirban says in order to manage their security risks sustainability, they realised they needed a security solution that would provide NASSCOM the freedom to manage and run the application on a daily basis.
