Payment

Mumbai, Aug 24 (UNI) Chief general manager of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), A M Pedgaonkar, today announced that payment and settlement in the country was fully compliant with the core principles of international settlement.

The system is aimed at the establishment of a secure, efficient, modern payment and settlement system in the country.

Addressing a conference on information security titled 'Business IT and IT governance beyond compliance' which was held by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here, Mr Pedgaonkar emphasized that the payment and settlement system in the country was fully compliant with the core principles of international settlement. RBI's objective was to establish the infrastructure required to the support the development of India's financial markets and banking sector. The second objective being to improve the efficiency and quality of the bank's financial and accounting operations, he said.

Prior to it, the chairman, CII western region, Farhad Forbes, emphasized that the growing threat to information theft, alteration, and destruction was the most serious concern today for all sectors.

IT governance is like quality assurance in manufacturing and the risks and costs of not doing it can be expensive, he warned. Hence he suggested having a voluntary compliance than enforced legislation.

The Chief Technical Officer of Yahoo! India which sponsored the seminar, Prasad Ram, pointed out that when a business that spans 25 countries in 17 to 18 languages, provides a whole range of services with data being replicated, stored and merged at diverse locations, the challenge is which regulations to comply with and how. The scope for online fraud is huge and the economics are very attractive for fraudsters because it costs very little.

Therefore it is difficult to bring them within the ambit of the law, he rued.

The conference chairman and president, Information Systems&Audit Control Association, Venugopal Iyengar, stressed that if you have IT governance in your organisation, there will be no gap and hence, no breach of security. As facilities keep increasing, governing and controlling them becomes a challenge, he added.

Avinash Kadam, international vice president, ISACA&director, MIEL e security, underlined the need of following simple best practices for IT governance to ensure that there was no surprise in store.

Bharat Mehta, Iflex Solutions, revealed that there was a race between those protecting systems and the hackers. He said that the IT security threat for organisations was more from within the organisations rather than outside, and hence advocated self- compliance to ensure IT security.

UNI KKD WD SKB2012