What India can learn from the Japan Internet separation mandate?

The rapid increase in cybercrimes targeted at government agencies has sparked the need for resilient technologies to protect the government institutions from the Internet.

What India can learn from the Japan Internet separation mandate?By Jagjit Arora, VMware

It is quite a common sight these days to find people juggling multiple mobile phones in order to keep their business and personal activities separate.

When this extends to government organizations with executives trying to clumsily manage multiple devices, the situation exposes citizen organizations to real security risks. Further, governments which are responsible for delivering various citizen services while maintaining strict security and privacy of citizen personal data, start to falter.

This explains the clamour and the concerns in the courts today about security guarantees from Central Government’s extensive Aadhaar implementation initiatives in various citizen and financial services.

There is a definite upswing today in the extent and volume of government services such as Cash Benefit Schemes (Cooking gas subsidy etc.), passport services and income tax services, going digital across the country.

This is only going to ramp up with time and so are the security challenges. With the steep rise in the ubiquity of mobile devices, workers increasingly prefer to access both business and personal digital services right on their mobile devices.

It becomes extremely difficult to manually comply with organizational mandates on following internet separation among multiple devices being used. There are bound to be violations due to policy breaches forcing organizations to become reactive.

This is certainly not an efficient or a desirable way to manage security or scale digital services especially when citizen and national security considerations are paramount.

As more and more government services move online, several corresponding public sector organizations such as power corporations, natural gas agencies also follow suit in order to fulfill the government mandate. This creates a compounding momentum in digital service proliferation across the board. These initiatives are most often announced with aggressive deadlines.

In fact, to effectively resolve this, we just need to take a cue from countries like Japan who have established a national policy on Internet separation through secure digital workspace as a fundamental requirement and a core design principle for all its digital initiatives moving forward.

So, going down the path of internet separation through physically separate devices is neither effective nor sustainable and won’t just do.

On the other hand, the rapid increase in cybercrimes targeted at government agencies has sparked the need for resilient technologies to protect the government institutions from the Internet.

In government departments, a large number of desktops and other end user devices are typically connected to the internet for browsing and email while they are simultaneously connected through internal networks to other desktops and critical application servers. Hence, if there is an infection, it starts spreading to critical applications and databases on the LAN leading to a widespread threat.

Managing government organizational needs and security risks through physical internet separation also disrupts natural workflows, impairs organizational collaboration, slows down productivity and increases costs while not adequately addressing the security exposure of the governments and its citizens.

With secure digital workspace, it is possible to achieve internet separation by secure access to the Internet from an officer’s single terminal to improve defense against security threats and operational efficiency.

Apart from providing internet separation, a secure digital workspace is also the most effective solution that prevents unauthorized content from going out and malicious code or files from coming in, detects/neutralizes threats, cleanses dormant/sleeper malware and prevents unauthorized traffic flows.

Virtualized digital workspaces provide secure access to any application on any device based on the role defined in the central Active Directory.

At the backend, they provide micro-segmented, zero trust security at a fine granular level and implement one-way-trust for clients accessing the Internet. With an advanced security firewall architecture that authorizes internal as well as external traffic flows, the solution offers a centrally managed and secure solution that provides unfettered access to all authorized applications on any device.

Most importantly, digital workspaces provide a firewall at every virtualized client level to ensure that potential threats don’t spread beyond the affected client.

Leading public sector institutions have embraced virtualized digital workspace solutions with complete branch automation through virtual desktops, micro-segmented applications, and secure file servers providing access to employees on a wide variety of devices.

Government and its agencies are at the forefront of digital adoption in the country. They need to adopt secure digital workspace as the new model of internet separation to address the challenges of cybersecurity while enhancing the user experience, improving workforce productivity and reducing costs.

However, IT departments at various government agencies are at differing levels of maturity. Accordingly, they should begin to virtualize their data centers, architect private clouds and begin to project infrastructure in terms of cloud capacity based on a 6-9 month project roadmap in place of project-wise HW budgets.

Public cloud can also be a viable option in future once regulatory concerns are addressed. The government in India should take a leaf out of nations like Japan and implement internet separation more as an overarching policy than as a manual workaround.

(Jagjit Arora is senior director-sales, VMware. Views expressed above are his own)

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