IIIT Sri City to launch cyber security course

Tirupati: Indian Institute of Information Technology- (IIIT) Sri City is set to focus on emerging verticals such as manufacturing, fintech, healthcare, smart cities, etc and horizontals such as analytics, cyber security, block chain, etc.

Sri City IIIT Director Dr G Kannabiran said that a great potential for career opportunities and collaborative research in the area of cyber security is clearly seen and informed that IIT decided to start a course in cyber security with active participation of leading organisations. He was speaking at the valedictory of the two-day workshop on information security with focus on cyber security held at IIIT in Sri City on Tuesday. 

Sri City Chairman Srinivasa Raju, who is also industry partner and IIIT Sri City board member, highlighted the need to focus on practical and industry orientation as part of the teaching and learning. He further emphasised learning outside the classrooms through technical clubs and necessary infrastructure shall be made available to the students. 

Dr Ananda Kumar, Global Integrated Delivery Leader, IBM Security in his key note address said as cyber threats looms large with enormous data breaches occurring at an unprecedented rate, it becomes imperative to do a predictive data protection analysis. Recent cyber-attacks include the Marriott cyber-attack which affected 52.5 lakh passports in India.

Ransomware attacks are most dangerous and is quite prevalent as big IT houses are charged in bitcoins to get back their own proprietary data. In case of government sectors as well, data breaches can be very dangerous. 

Thus, all these problems motivate the requirement of about 35 lakh cyber security job opportunities across the globe by 2021. The industry experts also had a discussion with the faculty of IIIT Sri City on potential opportunities for collaborative research.

It was proposed to form advisory group with cyber security professionals to take the research collaboration forward. The workshop was hosted at IIIT Sri City with marked industry presence from top-notch IT industries like IBM, Wipro and HCL Technologies.