Airtel Business, the enterprise arm of India’s global communications solutions provider Bharti Airtel, says it has secured a multi-year contract from the Indian Railway Security Operations Centre (IRSOC) to deliver security services to safeguard the digital backbone of India’s railway network.
Airtel will design, build, implement and operate a greenfield, multi-layered, cybersecurity 24x7x365 protection ecosystem that will serve as a resilient defence barrier to safeguard the Indian Railways’ IT backbone, while ensuring uninterrupted, secure and seamless digital operation.
Airtel Business says it will build multi-layer protection to secure the expansive database of the railways and will also safeguard the end-to-end digital operations of the country’s railway services, which include 160,000 employees distributed across 26 locations.
Airtel Secure, as the planned system is known, will offer a centralised security architecture that includes a comprehensive compliance dashboard that delivers centralised visibility and real-time monitoring across more than 26 locations and all integrated security tools.
The offering will also include an AI-driven, endpoint detection and response advanced cybersecurity solution, ensuring that all endpoints are continuously monitored and secured.
Robust patch and vulnerability management, meanwhile, will allow a single window view and real-time monitoring of more than 190,000 critical infrastructure assets/devices and inventories across 26 locations and sub-locations.
Also incorporated is what Airtel calls next-gen monitoring: AI-driven systems that leverage machine learning and behavioural analytics to continuously monitor, predict and neutralise threats in real time — achieving a mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) of less than 20 seconds.
The solution also incorporates threat intelligence and dark web monitoring, which will proactively monitor and detect risks, while strong network and access controls will include firewalls, routers, MPLS networks and credential safeguards to secure mission-critical applications
India’s railway services operate over 13,000 trains, serve more than 20 million commuters and enable millions of digital transactions each day, while transporting over 1.5 billion tons of freight annually. As Airtel points out, safeguarding this immense flow of critical data including sensitive customer identities and payment details, as well as key operational databases for ticketing, train tracking, freight and signalling is crucial in today’s era of intensifying cyberthreats.
With these new services it says over one billion Indians will benefit from enhanced data security for seamless ticket booking, payments, train tracking and much more.
