The primary role of NeSL is to serve as a repository of legal evidence holding the information pertaining to any debt/claim, as submitted by the financial or operational creditor and verified and authenticated by the parties to the debt. Being a repository in nature with long-term retention as per regulations, the importance of the security of the data is of utmost importance.
Data security, as per Gartner (a globally recognised technological research and consulting agency) comprises the processes and associated tools that protect sensitive information assets, either in transit or at rest.
Data security methods include:
- Encryption (applying a cryptographic algorithm so that data is not easily read and/or altered by unauthorized parties)
- Masking (substituting all or part of a high-value data item with a low-value representative token)
- Erasure (ensuring that data that is no longer active or used is reliably deleted from a repository)
- Resilience (creating backup copies of data so that organizations can recover data should it be erased or corrupted accidentally or stolen during a data breach)
According to Gartner, a digital transformation includes information technology modernization, adoption of cloud computing, digital optimization, or even the invention of new digital business models. Forrester (Another globally acclaimed research and advisory organisation) adds that a digital transformation is also the journey of moving to a digital-first business model. In short, Digital transformation is the realignment of new initiatives in technology, business models and processes, to generate greater value for people to compete more effectively in a constantly changing digital economy.
NeSL with due diligence as per its mission statement strives to provide a superior digital experience to all users of our services and comply with best practices related to information security. NeSL is keen on responding to the requirements of the industry thereby bringing superior products and solutions to meet the same, leading the way for digital transformation in its domain. NeSL Digital Document Execution (DDE) product facilitates dematerialisation of contracts/document execution and customer acquisition. NeSL e-BG (Electronic Bank Guarantee) eliminates the physical documentation usually associated with the issuance of BG. It reduces the turn-around time of the BG issuance and delivery to the beneficiary.
In today’s sophisticated environment, Cybersecurity threats are continuously emerging and bring up smarter ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the systems. Whether it is stored data or data in motion, even simple encryption can give confidence in increasing its security. While attacks are a reality in front of everyone, we can protect and minimise the resulting damage with the strongest encryption algorithms protecting data. Even though various applications gain momentum with the advent of new technologies such as Quantum computing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Large language Models (LLM)/ Generative AI etc, the offenders, especially nation-state threat actors are also equally leveraging on the same. The encryption standards to protect the data matured from the early DES (Data Encryption Standard with a key length of 56 bits (standards published in 1977) to present 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standards). With the present advancements, the necessity of higher encryption models was felt and researchers are in the process of bringing up Quantum resistant algorithms that withstand code-breaking efforts from any quantum computers. These cryptographic algorithms are known as quantum-secure, post-quantum or quantum-safe formulas. Unlike current algorithms, quantum-resistant ones have much larger key sizes.
-by Jyothish Jolisa
VP (Information Security) & CISO
