Infosys’ Salil Parekh says cybersecurity today should come before tech building, not after

Infosys CEO & MD Salil Parekh (File image)

Digital transformation and cloud adoption has made it imperative that anything that is built is based on trust. Cybersecurity today needs to be built grounds up and not as an afterthought, said Infosys CEO Salil Parekh shedding light on the importance of security in times of biased artificial intelligence and large-scale data gathering and processing.

In a conversation with Microsoft India president Anant Maheshwari at the Microsoft Future Ready Leadership Summit in Mumbai, Parekh said, “Trust is the bedrock of everything tech today. Digital transformation and cloud adoption has made it imperative that anything that is built is based on trust. The large enterprises that are successful today need to build their grounds up. Cyber cannot come after. That’s become a huge differentiator.”

Parekh added, “The other concern is building responsible artificial intelligence architecture. We have seen large banks with unforeseen biases in AI against some customers. Artificial intelligence needs to be programmed without biases.”

Maheshwari and Parekh were joined by SN Subhrahmanyam, CEO & MD of L&T and Vishakha Mulye, CEO of Aditya Birla Capital in a panel discussion at the event.

Parekh also highlighted the need to build responsible data loops. Data looping is the process of end-to-end data collection and processing that involves aggregating, mining, modelling and visualising data sets.

“In terms of the data loop, we are seeing people need to be critical of how the data is managed, where it is created and how it is used and then responsibly make sure it is leveraged into the activities on both predictive and automation side. There the importance is to make sure that the data loop covers all the aspects and has a way to be used that is not disruptive,” Parekh said.

He added, “Today’s data loop is much more responsible, we are creating a 360-degree coverage of how it is used and sourced. We have also built a platform for it.”

Parekh’s thoughts were later echoed by Microsoft’s global CEO Satya Nadella who said that cybersecurity and privacy are key imperatives that will drive economic growth through technology in India.