Saturday, March 26, 2011

Safeguarding The Digital Economy

Digital economy is a parallel world where everything happens in an online environment. The concept of digital economy is very wide and it covers almost all the areas of interaction among human beings. These days, it includes every aspect of life from health to education and from business to banking. The latest to add to this list are e-governance and e-commerce.

Digital economy has brought its own shares of problems as well. The biggest of them is pertaining to safeguarding the same from cyber attacks and malicious activities. In fact, it has become a real challenge to secure critical national infrastructure from cyber attacks these days.

Digital Economy cannot be safeguarded till we have good and effective Cyber Security Laws on the one hand and effective Information Security Policy on the other, tells Praveen Dalal, Managing Partner of Perry4Law and leading techno legal expert of India.

Two of the most important aspects of Digital Economy are Social Networking Sites and Virtual Worlds. These Social Networking Sites and Virtual Worlds must be protected from Cyber Attacks and Malicious acts, suggests Dalal.

Cyber security is presently lagging far behind than the sophisticated cyber attacks. Cyber security industry must be innovative and responsive in order to protect digital economy from growing nuisance of cyber crimes and cyber attacks.

Digital economy also brings its own sets of rights and civil liberty issues. For instance, Civil Liberty aspects of Cyberspace must be kept in mind by various Governments while delivering services in a Digital Environment, suggests Dalal.

Digital economy is not an easy world to manage and handle. There must be a gradual shift to digital economy with proper legal framework and policies at place.