Pankaj Mishra & Joji Thomas Philip, Bangalore/New Delhi
The Economic Times
India's biggest mobile phone firm Bharti Airtel has become one of the first enterprises globally to have received ISO 27001 certification for its information security management system, across 300 locations and over 40,000 information assets.
The certification will help the company become India's most trusted brand by 2010, said Jai Menon, director customer service and technology of Bharti Airtel. "As we expand beyond traditional voice-based services to areas such as mobile commerce, ISO 27001 will play a critical role," he said.
The ISO 27001 standard replaced BS7799 few years ago, which had over 2,500 organisations worldwide certified against it.
Bharti has almost 2,500 computer servers and around 2,500 terabytes of data. "Apart from securing digital data, we are also including physical data security as part of this initiative," Menon added. Bharti started rolling out its comprehensive information security policy in 2003, received its first certifications two years ago. "We will need to sustain this initiative through continued compliance," he said.
"While it took tremendous involvement from the entire organisation to achieve this feat, what makes it extra special is the sheer extent of its scope, which encompassed all the strategic Business units of Bharti Airtel, viz. all the circles of mobile services and all the hubs of both, Telemedia Services and Enterprise Services.
The scope also included all Data Centers, network zones, landing stations, switch locations and Airtel Center. The geographical extent of the scope covered around 300 locations spread across the entire country. In terms of personnel, the scope covered all the employees of Bharti Airtel," Menon added.
The telco said that it has been awarded 29 ISO 27001:2005 certificates by the British Standards Institute. According to the data available in the International Register of ISMS Certificates, this is the largest number of ISO 27001:2005 certificates awarded to any single company in India across all sectors and one of the largest in the world.
0 comments:
Post a Comment