India's Airtel puts $13M in Security Intelligence Center

India's second-largest service provider, Bharti Airtel, has launched the Security Intelligence Center in the National Capital Region with an investment of INR1000 million ($13 million).

The company also launched Airtel Secure, a suite of cybersecurity solutions for enterprise customers.

Figure 1: All locked up: The global pandemic has meant more of us working from home – and more cybercrime.
(Source: Ira Mint on Unsplash)

Airtel has partnered with several vendors, including Cisco, Radware, VMware and Forcepoint. Airtel Secure is already available to more than a million customers, according to a press release issued by the company.

Because most are still working from home, the past few months have seen an unprecedented number of cyberattacks.

"Malicious elements know that several companies in order to quickly enable work-from-home enabled access into various applications, data centers, maybe not the way they would have ideally done in the normal circumstances," said Harmeen Mehta, chief information officer at Bharti Airtel, at a recent industry event.

"The phishing attacks across the country have gone up by 500-600% and so have DDoS attacks as well."

Ex machina
India, the second largest internet market, ranks fifth when it comes to cyberattacks.

The Security Intelligence Center will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools to mitigate potential security risks. It will also offer tracking services to enterprises of all sizes.

Want to know more about security? Check out our dedicated security channel here on
Light Reading.

The collaboration with Radware includes an exclusive scrubbing center for data in the country. This will be hosted in Airtel's datacenter arm Nxtra's infrastructure in Chennai.

Between them, Airtel and Cisco will bring security solutions for networks, endpoints, applications and cloud, to the market.

The enterprise market is becoming increasingly important for telcos in the wake of rapid digitization because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Airtel recently tied up with Verizon to offer its Blue Jeans video conferencing services. Earlier in 2020, the service provider also tied up with Google Cloud.

The enterprise segment is also the focus of arch-rival Reliance Jio, which has collaborated with Microsoft Azure to address the demands of business customers.

Related posts:

— Gagandeep Kaur, contributing editor, special to Light Reading