Amrita University’s Technology Business Incubator (TBI) and its Center for Cybersecurity Systems and Networks (CCSN) have both come together to set up India’s first startup hub to focus exclusively on cybersecurity. The initiative will bring together research, funding and industry on the same platform to build the next wave of cybersecurity startups in India.
Amrita University’s Technology Business Incubator (TBI) is one of the only 6 incubators selected from 232 contenders across India to be made world-class under NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission (AIM). According to NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, the objective is to radically transform the startup ecosystem in India by providing financial scale-up support to these six “rarest of the rare” incubators and upgrade them to global standards. Each of these will receive 1.4 million dollars (approximately rupees 10 crores ) over a span of two years to provide state-of-the-art facilities to the incubated startups.
Said Dr. Krishnashree Achuthan, CEO of Amrita University’s Technology Business Incubator (TBI), “There are more than 4,000 startups in the country today, but less than 100 operate in the field of cybersecurity and build related products. With wars being fought every minute across the world in cyberspace, cybersecurity has become a strategic national priority. India needs to tackle this challenge from both an economic and military perspective. The new Amrita University Cybersecurity Startup Hub would enable us to usher in a new era of innovation, research and startups in the field of cybersecurity, helping us meet a critical national need.”
Cybersecurity is estimated to be a 70 billion dollar industry worldwide, with an annual loss of 400 billion dollars due to cybercrime and threats. This loss is expected to shoot up to 2 trillion dollars by 2020. Dr Krishnashree further said, “The shift towards cloud services and storage poses a challenge in securing data. An incredible amount of data is flowing around the Internet to servers at different geo-locations with minimal or faulty SSL encryption. The policies to protect this data are not on par with the growth of cloud-based services.”
India witnessed an estimated 50,000 cybersecurity incidents in 2015. More than 26,000 websites have been defaced and 91 lakh infected systems have been detected in the country till now. Worse, 80 percent of all cybercrimes go unreported. Without strong software security and protection techniques, all software-based systems are vulnerable to devastating attacks from hackers and spies.
