This year has been yet another eventful year for security. IT infrastructure is undergoing transformation for consolidation, optimization, agility, and better service delivery. Trends like mobility & BYOD are increasingly becoming relevant to businesses. Similarly, success stories with adoption of cloud services are driving its case for business adoption. There has been tremendous innovation around the Applications ecosystem, which has led to transformation, commoditization, focus on service oriented architecture and inherent processing strength to manage extreme transactions. Globalization and hyper specialization are providing a new impetus, extending boundaries of corporate and leveraging the global ICT supply chain. Experimentation with data repositories, data mining and their integration with businesses is traversing existing boundaries. This evolution is heading towards an unprecedented complexity, bringing completely new paradigm for security where contemporary capabilities becoming either insufficient or irrelevant.

This year has also provided more evidence on the role of cyber threats to cause noticeable kinetic impact. The Mandiant report revealed how cyber espionage skills, techniques, efforts and operations are being organized beyond one’s imagination. APT’s have become a key theme for security talks and deliberations. This year also witnessed dramatic rise of DDoS attacks, alarming the security community with their size, speed and complexity going much beyond the boundaries of paradigm it is dealing with.

This year has also brought about the realization that organizational security and cyber security are closely intertwined and the role of the private sector in the affairs of national security is increasingly recognized. Nation states are inventing policy tools and instruments to drive industry sectors as well as ensure their participation. Nation states are organizing cyber security efforts, laying down policies, doctrines, standards and frameworks.

While security is becoming key agenda items, it is not immune to conflicts and controversies. Availability of information, possibility of mining data through Big Data capabilities and the use of data for predictive analysis are providing new avenues for the purpose of crime investigation and national security. This year’s revelation of state snooping on communication brings many ethical issues forward. The use of information for commercial purposes is fuelling privacy debates, driving importance to the discipline of privacy and leading to introduction of new complexities. Technology, innovation, global market integration, complex global ICT supply chain, uniform global product architectures and global sourcing models are challenging existing state controlled institutions. They are traversing the sovereign boundaries of a nation, demanding formation of a global order, to govern them in a predictable, transparent and participatory manner.

The security market is responding to these complex facets by introducing security architectures, capabilities, technologies and practices which are catching up with the fast moving threat landscape. They are finding solutions to deal with complexities, helping comprehend nature and character of advanced threats in addition to empowering informed decision making and provide crucial help to protect and contain damage from multifarious threats.

The NASSCOM-DSCI Annual Information Security Summit, 2013 brings the security community and other stakeholders together, to deliberate and ponder over the diverse set of issues and challenges AISS is established as the meeting point for security in India and it facilitates enriching dialogue between different security communities representing a wide variety of industry segments. It acts as a bridge to connect buyers and providers and helps in enhancing the maturity of security market conditions. It provides opportunities to interact with policy makers and delves deep into policy making dilemmas both at national and global platforms. Annual Information Security Summit, 2013 is poised to expand its scope, present rich content, engaging deliberations and traverse existing boundaries by adding a set of new features and possibilities.