UK To Help Set Up India Cyber-Security Centre

The British and Indian governments have announced they will collaborate on cyber-security during the first official visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the UK.

During a visit by Modi to Chequers on Friday, British Prime Minister David Cameron agreed that the UK will work with India to establish a new cyber-security training centre and to help set up a new Indian cyber-crime unit.

Cyber-security cooperation

Cameron and Modi also discussed generally strengthening the security partnership between the two countries with the exchange of counter-terrorism best practices and technologies and cyber-security expertise, the government said in a statement.

Modi is the first Indian head of government to pay an official visit to the UK in almost a decade, as the country has focused on other international partners. Cameron has visited India three times since taking office in 2010 in an effort to establish stronger ties.

Cameron said at a press conference he wants the UK to be India’s “number one partner” for supporting the finance of Indian infrastructure improvements planned by Modi.

Business investments

He later stated that during the visit British and Indian companies announced new collaborations worth a total of more than £9 billion. The government listed more than 20 deals and collaborations, including a £1.3bn investment by Vodafone.

The two countries said they would collaborate on clean energy in a deal worth £3.2bn in commercial agreements, joint research programmes and expertise-sharing initiatives.

India’s IT market is expanding rapidly, with Gartner estimating earlier this month that the country’s data centre market is set to be worth $2 billion (£1.3bn) by 2016, a 5.2 percent increase from this year, thanks to a massive push towards cloud and IaaS workloads from small and medium businesses in the subcontinent, boosting spend on cloud storage.

The storage market alone is set to hit $307 million (£202m) in 2016, a three percent hike from 2015.

“With increased focus on mobility and big data activities in India, software defined networking has the highest adoption rate amongst Indian enterprises,” Gartner stated at the time.

Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon are amongst the companies that have recently announced major data centre plans in India.

Are you a security pro? Try our quiz!